TORONTO, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- Canadian researchers have discovered the lifelong use of two languages can help delay the onset of dementia symptoms by four years.
Scientists with the Rotman Research Institute at the Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain studied 91 people who were monolingual and 93 were bilingual. The bilinguals included speakers of 25 different languages, the most prevalent being Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian.
The researchers found that 132 patients met criteria for probable Alzheimer's disease; the remaining 52 were diagnosed with other dementias.
"We are pretty dazzled by the results," says principal investigator Ellen Bialystok of the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest. "Our study found that speaking two languages throughout one's life appears to be associated with a delay in the onset of symptoms of dementia by four years compared to those who speak one language."
The researchers determined that the mean age of onset of dementia symptoms in the monolingual group was 71.4 years, while the bilingual group was 75.5 years, according to the study published in Neuropsychologia.
