Speaking Two Languages may Benefit Alzheimer's Patients

Speaking more than one language can help maintain memory reserve in patients with Alzheimer's disease finds a new study.

Highlights

Being fluent in two or more languages can have a positive impact on patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
Language can exercise specific brain regions known to be weakened by the disease and can thereby increase cortical thickness and grey matter density.
Multilingual people can compensate for Alzheimer’s disease-related tissue loss by accessing other brain regions for memory processing.

Speaking two or more languages can have a positive impact on patients with Alzheimer’s disease. These patients who are bilingual were able to access other brain regions to compensate for disease-related tissue loss finds a new study. The findings of this study are published in the Neuropsychologia journal.

"Most of the previous research on brain structure was conducted with healthy younger or older adults," says Natalie Phillips, a professor in the Department of Psychology.

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Speaking two languages can help delay the onset of Alzheimer's symptoms by as long as five years, Canadian scientists said Tuesday.

‘Speaking two languages can exercise specific brain regions in patients with Alzheimer's disease. Multilingual people might be able to compensate for Alzheimer's disease-related tissue loss by accessing other brain regions for memory processing.’

"Our new study contributes to the hypothesis that having two languages exercises specific brain regions and can increase cortical thickness and grey matter density. And it extends these findings by demonstrating that these structural differences can be seen in the brains of a multilingual AD and MCI patients."

Phillips and her team are the first to use high-resolution, whole-brain MRI data and sophisticated analysis techniques to measure cortical thickness and tissue density within specific brain areas.

Namely, they investigated language and cognition control areas in the frontal regions of the brain, and medial temporal lobe structures that are important for memory and are brain areas known to atrophy in MCI and AD patients.

Bilingualism Can Help Delay Onset of Alzheimer's
Alzheimer's patients who speak more than one language have a better chance of delaying the onset of severe deterioration than their monolingual counterparts.

"Previous studies used CT scans, which are a much less sensitive measure," says Phillips, founding director of Concordia’s Cognition, Aging and Psychophysiology (CAP) Lab.

The study looked at MRIs from participating patients from the Jewish General Hospital Memory Clinic in Montreal.

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A Northwestern University study will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Their sample included 34 monolingual MCI patients, 34 multilingual MCI patients, 13 monolingual AD patients and 13 multilingual AD patients.

Phillips believes their study is the first to assess the structure of MCI and AD patients’ language and cognition control regions. It is also the first to demonstrate an association between those regions of the brain and memory function in these groups and the first to control for immigration status in these groups.

Brain Prowess Boosted by Bilingualism
The ability to speak multiple languages is associated with better mental capacities,a new study from the University of California, Los Angeles has revealed.

"Our results contribute to research that indicates that speaking more than one language is one of a number of lifestyle factors that contributes to cognitive reserve," Phillips says.

"They support the notion that multilingualism and it’s associated cognitive and sociocultural benefits are associated with brain plasticity."

Phillips and her team are already building on their findings. "Our study seems to suggest that multilingual people are able to compensate for AD-related tissue loss by accessing alternative networks or other brain regions for memory processing. We’re actively investigating that hypothesis now."

Reference

Hilary D.Duncanab, JimNikelskic, Randi Pilon, Jason Steffenerade, Howard Chertkow, Natalie A.Phillips. Structural brain differences between monolingual and multilingual patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer disease: Evidence for cognitive reserve, Neuropsychologia (2018).https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.12.036

Source-Eurekalert