Being bilingual may delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease by up to five years, new research suggests. This adds to a growing body of evidence that speaking multiple languages can contribute to brain resilience and connectivity as we age.
Alzheimer's affects roughly 5.8 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The progressive disease is the most common form of dementia and is associated with memory loss and cognitive decline in regions of the brain involved in thought, memory and language.
Mental stimulation, such as speaking multiple languages or learning new skills, are thought to help protect the brain from deteriorating as we age. Now, scientists at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, have used advanced brain-imaging techniques to determine whether bilingualism physically alters the brain's structure to make it more resilient.
"Speaking more than one language is one of several ways to be cognitively and socially engaged, which promotes brain health," co-author Natalie Phillips, a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Concordia University research chair in sensory-cognitive health in aging and dementia, said in a statement.
"This research study was unique in that it was able to look at the potential influence of being bilingual on brain structure across the continuum of dementia risk, ranging from individuals who were cognitively normal, to those who are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer's, to those who actually have the disease."
Specifically, the researchers examined brain regions involved in learning and memory called the hippocampus, which is known to be highly affected by Alzheimer's. Their findings were published online by Cambridge University Press.
"The brain volume in the Alzheimer's-related area was the same across the healthy older adults, the two risk states and the Alzheimer's disease group in the bilingual participants," study's lead author Kristina Coulter, a Ph.D candidate at Concordia University, said in a statement.
In other words, the hippocampi in bilingual individuals with Alzheimer's were noticeably larger than those who were monolingual of the same age, education level, cognitive function and memory.
"This suggests that there may be some form of brain maintenance related to bilingualism," Coulter said.
This research comes one week after scientists in Spain and Canada revealed that bilingual brains might be more efficient. The study, published in the journal Communications Biology, conducted MRI scans on 151 participants and found that those who were bilingual showed significantly more connectivity between different regions of their brain.
This is important because our brains are like cities—if you only had one subway line, things would go pretty slowly, and if there was a problem with that line the city would grind to a halt. However, if you have multiple subway lines, people—or in this case information—can be transported much more efficiently, with alternative routes available if something goes wrong.
And it is this increased resilience that the Concordia University team believe may offer protective effects against Alzheimer's in older age. However, more research is required to confirm these findings.
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References
Coulter, K., & Phillips, N. A. (2024). Bilinguals show evidence of brain maintenance in Alzheimer's disease. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728924000221
Gracia-Tabuenca, Z., Barbeau, E.B., Kousaie, S. et al. (2024). Enhanced efficiency in the bilingual brain through the inter-hemispheric cortico-cerebellar pathway in early second language acquisition. Commun Biol 7, 1298. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-06965-1
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