David Goodhue - AHN Reporter
Baltimore, MD (AHN) - Superior language skills early in life may stave off Alzheimer's disease later on, even in people who have the brain plaque that is typically a precursor to the disease, according to a new study.
Researchers from several universities and foundations examined the brains of 38 Catholic nuns after death. The participants agreed to take part in the so-called "Nun study," an ongoing clinical study of Catholic nuns of the School Sisters of Notre Dame.
The sisters were divided into two groups - ones with memory problems and signs of Alzheimer's disease in the brain, and women with normal memory with or without signs of the disease.
The researchers analyzed essays that 14 of the nuns wrote when they entered the convent in their late teens or early 20s. They looked at the average amount of ideas that were expressed for every 10 words written. Grammar complexity was also considered.
The women with memory problems later in life scored 20 percent lower in the language analysis than women without memory problems. The grammar score showed no difference between the two groups.
"Our results show that an intellectual ability test in the early 20s may predict the likelihood of remaining cognitively normal five or six decades later, even in the presence of a large amount of Alzheimer's disease pathology," Dr. Juan C. Troncoso, one of the study's authors from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said in a statement.
The study appears in the July 9 online edition of Neurology.
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