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Early Language Abilities May Protect Memory Decades Later
Language Skills May Ward Off Alzheimer’s, Dementia
By CRYSTAL PHEND
MedPage Today Staff Writer

July 9, 2009—

Women with sophisticated language as young adults were less likely to suffer the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in old age — even when the characteristic brain lesions associated with Alzheimer’s were present at death, researchers found.

The importance of these skills — measured by the “idea density” in an essay they wrote early in adulthood — held for women with intact cognition, regardless of whether a brain autopsy showed the hallmark plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s, Dr. Juan Troncoso of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues reported online in the journal Neurology.

The findings add to the evidence for a so-called “cognitive reserve” that protects against the effects of neurological disease, according to Dr. Robert Stern, a professor of neurology and Alzheimer’s expert at Boston University, who was not involved in the study.

Language abilities — like other measures of this reserve, such as years of education — appear to be linked to “bigger and better brains,” with more connections between neurons, he said. Rather than decreasing the likelihood that a person will develop Alzheimer’s, it apparently staves off some clinical symptoms of the underlying disease, such as memory loss.

Exercising the mind early in life may help build a protective cognitive reserve, although studies like this cannot prove that these mental exercises are effective, added Dr. Samuel Gandy of Mount Sinai Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in New York.

“The notion of recommending language acquisition as a kind of mental exercise that might lower one’s risk for Alzheimer’s disease follows logically,” Gandy said.

And even if it doesn’t help in the end, language skills certainly can’t hurt, he said.

Alzheimer’s disease has puzzled researchers because the same degree of damage to the brain causes severe symptoms in some people, but not in others, Troncoso’s group noted.

To determine what factors earlier in life might produce these differences, the researchers looked at a particularly Alzheimer’s-vulnerable area of the brain during autopsies of 38 Roman Catholic nuns.
Language Skills May Stave Off Cognitive Impairment

Autopsies showed that women with known Alzheimer’s disease in this group had significant shrinkage of certain parts of the brain compared with those who had no symptoms or brain lesions.

But the women with asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease — who showed no cognitive impairment before death but showed Alzheimer’s disease-type brain lesions during an autopsy — had markedly larger compartments of key cells in their brains compared with all the other groups of women.

These features may indicate that the neurons in the brains of these women repaired themselves or grew and made new connections to compensate for damage, the researchers said.

Across these groups, there were no differences in age at death, education level, or time from last cognitive evaluation to death that could explain the results.

However, language ability earlier in life did appear to correlate with whether these women showed Alzheimer’s symptoms.

The researchers also analyzed essays that 14 of the women had written as they entered the convent five or six decades earlier.

What they found was that women without old-age cognitive impairments — including two with asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease — had expressed a significantly higher number of ideas for every 10 words in the essay than did the one patient with mild cognitive impairment and the five with Alzheimer’s disease.

Still, while the researchers called this a fascinating observation, they cautioned that the study is probably far too small to draw any solid conclusions about the benefits of a limber mind when it comes to warding off Alzheimer’s.

But though Gandy agreed that the study could not get at the mechanism behind the association, he noted that language skills are complex and exercise sensory, cognitive and motor areas of the brain at the same time.

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Flexible-screen This is either a step forward or a step back. You tell us. A computer display that you can roll up and stick in your pocket like a magazine. We’ll check it out on Engineering Works!

Computers are nifty. But they’re hard to take with you. Even a laptop is too big to put in your pocket. And the displays on small portables like Blackberries are hard to read.

But what if your computer looked like a magazine? And worked like one? You could hold it in your hands and read it like a magazine or a book. The display would be made of flexible plastic. The processor would be in the spine of the – magazine. You’d use a cable or wireless connection to load whatever you wanted to read from your desktop compute or laptop.

You’d use touch controls in a corner to open and close what you’re reading and turn the – page. Roll or fold it up and put it into your pocket or briefcase when you’re ready to go. One of the coolest things about a device like this is that you could load a whole shelf of books and magazines into it and walk off with them.

Computer engineers are getting close, but you can’t buy one yet. The displays aren’t sharp enough yet to read comfortably more than a few minutes. And the technology is still really expensive.
Discovery Tech Blog Squad
Photo: Fujitsu

Sat Apr 11, 2009 8:55PM EDT

Young people today are growing up in the midst of a media storm. The electronic input into their brains and lives is more than any previous generation. We have to wonder what the impact will be on their morals and their lives. In a sense, it is a social experiment taking place right before our eyes.

Consider that the average teenager will have seen 22,000 hours of television by the time he or she graduates from high school. To put that figure in perspective, he or she will only have been in a classroom for 11,000 hours. When I have shared this statistic with some audiences, they don’t believe that students will have seen that much television. But they come from averages collected by the A.C. Nielsen Company that monitors television.

Here’s another staggering figure: young people will listen to nearly 11,000 hours of music during their teen years. That figure comes from a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association and was collected before the popularity of the iPod. It seems reasonable to assume that this new invention has probably increased the hours of listening to music.

How much time do they spend on the Internet? That is a difficult number to find, but USA Today reports that teens spend about 16 percent of their time each day surfing the Internet or e-mailing. Another study found that 89 percent send or receive e-mail daily.

A study of other actual situations shows that video games were very important and concluded that male gamers spent an average of 58 minutes playing on the weekdays and one hour and 37 minutes playing on the weekends. The time spent by females was less but also significant.

Well, you get the picture. This generation is wired and this isn’t a good thing. They spend long hours in front of a screen (a TV screen, a computer screen, or a video screen). It’s time for them to unplug. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.