People who are bilingual throughout their lives and use dual languages in daily life have some protection from cognitive impairment, a new study has found.
A report published on February 20 found that older adults who were bilingual had better cognitive abilities than those who spoke only one language. Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
Researchers went door-to-door in Bengaluru, India, collecting data from 1,234 people aged 60 and older. Each person had either no cognitive impairment (NCI), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or dementia. The team then compared data on the individuals' language status.
The prevalence of dementia and mild cognitive impairment was higher among monolinguals than among bilinguals. Bilinguals' cognitive function was also better than monolinguals without cognitive impairment.
The news comes as another study published the same day in the same journal found that adolescent cognitive ability predicts dementia risk 60 years later. General cognitive ability during high school predicted cognitive impairment later in life. Researchers found that low educational attainment was associated with cognitive ability, putting people at risk for cognitive impairment. In addition to data from 2,477 cognitive assessments from the Project Talent Aging Study (PTAS), researchers used 6,491 responses from questionnaires.
“Adolescents' cognitive ability had a direct effect on their risk of CI, in addition to the indirect effect of educational attainment (18% to 30%) obtained after cognitive ability assessment,” the researchers wrote. ing.
A person's level of education and adolescent cognitive ability predicted participants' occupational cognitive complexity. However, the complexity of their future work did not mediate the association between adolescent cognitive ability and cognitive impairment. The research team believes this may be because people in cognitively more complex jobs have higher levels of education, and that cognitive complexity may be due to unique differences across education. The authors write that it cannot be explained.