An Underrated Tool Against Alzheimer’s

Dementia in general, and Alzheimer’s in particular, affects a lot of people, and probably even more than the stats show, because some (estimated to be: about half) will go undiagnosed and thus unreported:

Alzheimer’s: The Bad News And The Good

At 10almonds, we often talk about brain health, whether from a nutrition standpoint or other lifestyle factors. For nutrition, by the way, check out:

Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!

Today we’ll be looking at some new science for an underrated tool:

Bilingualism as protective factor

It’s well-known that bilingualism offers brain benefits, but most people would be hard-pressed to name what, specifically, those brain benefits are.

As doctors Kristina Coulter and Natalie Phillips found in a recent study, one of the measurable benefits may be a defense against generalized (i.e. not necessarily language-related) memory loss Alzheimer’s disease.

Specifically,

❝We used surface-based morphometry methods to measure cortical thickness and volume of language-related and AD-related brain regions. We did not observe evidence of brain reserve in language-related regions.

However, reduced hippocampal volume was observed for monolingual, but not bilingual, older adults with AD. Thus, bilingualism is hypothesized to contribute to reserve in the form of brain maintenance in the context of AD.❞

Read in full: Bilinguals show evidence of brain maintenance in Alzheimer’s disease

This is important, because while language is processed in various parts of the brain beyond the scope of this article, the hippocampi* are where memory is stored.

*usually mentioned in the singular as “hippocampus”, but you have one on each side, unless some terrible accident or incident befell you.

What this means in practical terms: these results suggest that being bilingual means we will retain more of our capacity for memory, even if we get Alzheimer’s disease, than people who are monolingual.

Furthermore, while we’re talking practicality:

❝…our subsample may be characterized as mostly late bilinguals (i.e., learning an L2 after age 5), having moderate self-reported L2 ability, and relatively few participants reporting daily L2 use (33 out of 119)❞

(L2 = second language)

This is important, because it means you don’t have to have grown up speaking multiple languages, you don’t even have to speak it well, and you don’t have to be using your second language(s) on a daily basis, to enjoy benefits. Merely having them in your head appears to be sufficient to trigger the brain to go “oh, we need to boost and maintain the hippocampal volume”.

We would hypothesize that using second language(s) regularly and/or speaking second language(s) well offers additional protection, and the data would support this if it weren’t for the fact that the sample sizes for daily and high-level speakers are a bit small to draw conclusions.

But the important part is: simply knowing another language, including if you literally just learned it later in life, is already protective of hippocampal volume in the context of Alzheimer’s disease.

Here’s a pop-science article about the study, that goes into it in more detail than we have room to here:

Bilingualism linked to greater brain resilience in older adults

Want to learn a new language?

Here are some options where you can get going right away:

Duolingo | Babbel | Lernu

If you are thinking “sounds good, but learning a language is too much work”, then that is why we included that third option there. It’s specifically for one language, and that language is Esperanto, arguably the world’s easiest language and specifically designed to be super quick and easy to get good at. Also, it’s free!

Do, kial ne lerni novan lingvon rapide kaj facile? 😉

Want to know more?

For ways to reduce your overall Alzheimer’s risk according to science, check out:

Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk

Take care!