Can you speak a second language? Researchers at the University of Edinburgh contend that people who speak more than one language and who form dementia are likely to do so up to five years later than those who can only speak one language.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad studied nearly 650 dementia patients and determined when each one had been diagnosed with the disorder.

They discovered that patients who knew two or more languages dealt with a later inception of a wide range of cognitive disorders, including vascular dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia.

The two-language benefit held true for illiterate people who had not gone to school. This suggests that the observed effect is not a result of dissimilarities in education.

It is the most comprehensive study so far to measure the effect of bilingualism on the inception of dementia – independent of a person’s formal education, gender, job and where they live (rural or city), all of which have been studied as potential causes impacting the beginning of dementia.

The researchers are hoping to conduct additional studies to identify the mechanism, which results in the interruption in the inception of dementia. The researchers propose that bilingual switching between dissimilar sounds, words, concepts, grammatical structures and social norms makes up a type of natural brain education, likely to be more effectual than any artificial brain education program.

“These findings suggest that bilingualism might have a stronger influence on dementia that any currently available drugs. This makes the study of the relationship between bilingualism and cognition one of our highest priorities,” noted Thomas Bak of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences.

What do you think of the study’s findings? Share your thoughts in the comments section.