Faced with the spread of Alzheimer's disease, studies are constantly being carried out in order to find a cure for those affected, or to uncover the mechanisms of the disease to be able to find preventive solutions.
Older studies have shown a link between bilingualism and the delayed onset of neurodegenerative diseases. But new research suggests that speaking two or more languages creates a cognitive reserve that the brain can use when other brain regions fail.
Yes, it's quite frightening to hear that certain regions of the brain can fail over time!
The 94 participants in the study are all patients at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. Twenty-six of them have Alzheimer's, the other 68 suffer from moderate cognitive impairment. In each group, one half is unilingual, and the other half speaks two or more languages.
Couples composed of a bilingual person and a monolingual person were formed, according to similar criteria such as their age, their level of education and the capacity of their immediate memory. Their brains were subsequently scanned to analyze this more closely.
The researchers focused on areas of the brain that were more likely to deteriorate due to Alzheimer's disease, such as the frontal areas linked, among other things, to language and therefore to its memorization. They reported that bilingual Alzheimer's patients showed less atrophy than monolinguals in these areas of the brain. Polyglot patients indeed had more gray matter, in brain areas that have been solicited by multilingualism during their lives.
“This suggests that their tamed cognitive reserve after several years of mastering multiple languages” protected them from further deterioration. This further confirms the hypothesis that “polyglot patients are able to use other networks to process and make use of their memory. say the researchers.
The bilingual patients, originally from Quebec, spoke two languages (French and English) from an early age. More research needs to be done, however, to find out if becoming bilingual later in life is as effective.
In any case, speaking more than one language becomes not only useful for day-to-day life but also for long-term life.
