Recent findings indicate that bilingualism delay the onset of dementia. Using data from the Betula longitudinal cohort study on memory, health and aging (www.betula.su.se) the issue of a possible protective effect of bilingualism was addressed.
Monolingual (n = 736) and bilingual (n = 82) participants (≥ 60 years) without dementia at inclusion were followed for incident dementia over a time-period up to 10 years. In total, 112 participants developed dementia. Analyses were performed with Cox proportional hazards regression adjusted for age, sex, and presence/absence of the Apolipoprotein E (APOE) ɛ4 allele, with dementia outcome as the dependent variable.
Results showed no delayed onset of dementia in bilinguals compared to monolinguals. However, because of the findings from a study using participants from the same population showing beneficial longitudinal effects of bilingualism on episodic memory; we argue that our results may depend on the frequency of use of the second language after retirement.
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2019. Translation, Interpreting, and the Bilingual Brain. In The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism, ► pp. 485 ff.
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2019. Multilingualism and Dementia Risk: Longitudinal Analysis of the Nun Study. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease 71:1 ► pp. 201 ff.
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2018. Cognitive consequences of bilingualism: where to go from here?. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 33:9 ► pp. 1205 ff.
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2017. Longitudinal effects of bilingualism on dual-tasking. PLOS ONE 12:12 ► pp. e0189299 ff.
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2024. A longitudinal study of episodic memory recall in multilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism 28:1 ► pp. 125 ff.
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