People who have good language skills as young adults may be better able to stay sharp in old age.
People who have good language skills as young adults may be better able to stay sharp in old age, even if they develop brain abnormalities in advanced Alzheimer's.
Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia. Research shows that the disease is associated with plaques and tangles in the brain.
Studies in the past have revealed that individuals with asymptomatic Alzheimer's have larger cells in many areas of the brain, as well as bigger cell structures called nuclei and nucleoli, than people with mild cognitive impairments. To further explore these findings, researchers examined the brains of 38 American Catholic sisters. Ten of the women had asymptomatic Alzheimer's when they died, five had mild cognitive impairment, and 10 had Alzheimer's, while another 13 women had no cognitive problems and no brain lesions and served as the control group. Language skills were compared among all the groups including ideas density and grammatical complexity in writings.
It was found that the women with asymptomatic Alzheimer's had larger neurons, nuclei, and nucleoli than the women with mild cognitive impairment, while the cells in the brains of women with Alzheimer's had shrunk more in comparison to those who had no cognitive impairment. Moreover, the women with no cognitive impairment wrote better essays than those with Alzheimer's or mild cognitive impairment. But there was no difference between the two groups in the degree of grammatical complexity.
These findings show that people's brain can adapt and change - a phenomenon known as plasticity - well into an individual's 80's and 90's. The researchers attributed the findings to the possibility that neurons get bigger to compensate for damage done by the toxic proteins produced in Alzheimer's disease, while the cell nuclei and nucleoli may be enlarged because they are making more DNA and RNA to repair this damage.
The researchers concluded that mental abilities at the age of 20 years indicate a brain that will be better able to cope with diseases later in life.
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