Brain scans: being bilingual can delay Alzheimer's
(exact mechanism isn't known)
(exact mechanism isn't known)
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A small study has found that people who speak more than one language have twice as much brain damage as those who are unilingual before they begin exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.
The finding suggests that being bilingual somehow conserves cognitive function for some time, despite there being areas of brain cells destroyed by the disease.
The study by a team of Toronto researchers, which analyzed brain scans of patients with probable Alzheimer's disease, is being called the first to provide physical evidence confirming observational studies suggesting speaking more than one language is beneficial for the brain.
To conduct the study, the researchers studied the CT scans of 40 patients whose cognitive skills — including attention, memory, planning and organizational abilities — were found on testing to be similar. Half the patients were fluently bilingual while the other half spoke only one language.
Tom Schweizer, a neuroscientist at St. Michael's Hospital who led the study published in the journal Cortex, said researchers analyzed how much damage had occurred in a certain area of the brain linked to Alzheimer's disease in each of the patients. Continue to read: dailytownsman.com
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