Bilingual people may have an edge against Alzheimers
People who speak two or more languages appear to weather the ravages of Alzheimers disease better than people who have only mastered one language, a new Italian study suggests.
Bilingual people with Alzheimers outperformed single-language speakers in short- and long-term memory tasks, even though scans showed more severe deterioration in brain metabolism among the bilingual participants, the scientists said.
The ability to speak two languages appears to provide the brain with more resilience to withstand damage from Alzheimers, said lead researcher Dr. Daniela Perani, a professor of psychology at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan.
The more often a person swapped between two languages during their lifetime, the more capable their brains became of switching to alternate pathways that maintained thinking skills even as Alzheimers damage accumulated, the researchers found. Previous studies have shown that lifelong bilingualism can delay the onset of dementia by as much as five years, Perani said. However, no one has yet examined what causes that effect in the brain.
To examine this more closely, Perani and her colleagues performed brain scans and memory tests on 85 seniors with Alzheimers. Among the participants, 45 spoke both German and Italian, while 40 only spoke one language.
The bilingual people dramatically outscored monolingual speakers on memory tests, scoring three to eight times higher, on average.
Bilingual people achieved these scores even though scans of their brains revealed more signs of cerebral hypometabolism -- a characteristic of Alzheimers in which the brain becomes less efficient at converting glucose into energy.
The brain scans also provided a clue why this might be. People who were bilingual appeared to have better functional connectivity in frontal brain regions, which allowed them to maintain better thinking despite their Alzheimers, Perani said.
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