{"id":2979,"date":"2013-11-28T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2013-11-28T12:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/?p=2979"},"modified":"2013-11-28T12:00:06","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T12:00:06","slug":"being-bilingual-may-delay-dementia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/being-bilingual-may-delay-dementia\/","title":{"rendered":"Being bilingual may delay dementia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\">People who speak more than one language and who develop dementia tend to do so on average 4.5 years later than those who are monolingual, a new study has found <em>writes <a title=\"Posts by Bryony Ashcroft\" href=\"http:\/\/expathealth.org\/author\/bryony-ashcroft\/\" rel=\"author\">Bryony Ashcroft<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The study, published in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neurology.org\/content\/early\/2013\/11\/06\/01.wnl.0000436620.33155.a4\" target=\"_blank\">Neurology<\/a>, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, observed the same delay\u00a0in illiterate patients, indicating education isn\u2019t an explanation for the differences.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0Researchers examined almost 650 dementia patients and found those who spoke two or more languages showed later onset of Alzheimer\u2019s disease, as well as frontotemporal dementia and vascular dementia.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The benefit doesn\u2019t extend beyond speaking two languages however, meaning speaking three or more languages doesn\u2019t appear to further delay the onset of dementia.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The study was conducted by the University of Edinburgh and Nizam\u2019s Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad, India. This region of India is home to multiple languages, which Barbara J. King, writing for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/13.7\/2013\/11\/14\/244813470\/new-study-shows-brain-benefits-of-bilingualism\" target=\"_blank\">NPR<\/a>, believes adds extra credibility to the results.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">In the Hyderabad region there are two dominant languages, Urdu and Telugu. Hindi and English are also routinely spoken, especially at school. So people raised in Hyderabad are often bilingual, with exposure to a third, sometimes fourth, language.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">This impacts on the results as the researchers explained, \u201cIn contrast to previous studies, the bilingual group was drawn from the same environment as the monolingual one and the results were therefore free from the confounding effects of immigration.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">This study is the largest to look at the bilingual effect on dementia, independent of education, sex, occupation, cardiovascular risk factors, and urban vs rural dwelling, all of which have been investigated in the past as potential factors affecting the onset of dementia.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Further research is needed to determine the mechanism which is delaying dementia, say the study authors. They suggested bilingual switching between different sounds, words, concepts, grammatical structures and social norms constituted a form of natural brain training.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Reproduced by kind permission of <a href=\"http:\/\/expathealth.org\">expathealth.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People who speak more than one language and who develop dementia tend to do so on average 4.5 years later than those who are monolingual, a new study has found writes Bryony Ashcroft. The study, published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, observed the same delay\u00a0in illiterate patients, indicating education &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/being-bilingual-may-delay-dementia\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Being bilingual may delay dementia<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,24,6,30,23,25,26,28,27,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alc-health-news","category-alc-international-health-insurance-news","category-alc-travel-news","category-expat-alert","category-expat-global-health-news","category-global-health-news","category-global-health-options","category-global-medical-alert","category-global-medical-insurance-news","category-health-alert-worldwide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alchealth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}