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Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

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21–30 of 161 posts

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#21
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I haven’t read the paper but how can you control for correlated stuff here, e.g. bilingual people are likely to be richer, more intelligent, exercise more, eat better more varied food and have richer social lives. Maybe.

Are immigrants and their children likely to be richer, eat better, etc?

Those who are bilingual, yes.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#22
post #3

> They recruited 63 healthy individuals, 135 patients with mild cognitive impairment such as memory loss, and 68 people with Alzheimer's – the most prevalent type of dementia – in four hospitals in Barcelona and the metropolitan area Wait so, N = 266? All from Barcelona? C'mon.

Yes, I haven’t read the paper but how can you control for correlated stuff here, e.g. bilingual people are likely to be richer, more intelligent, exercise more, eat better more varied food and have richer social lives. Maybe.

This is why they chose Barcelona, where the use of 2 languages (Catalan and Spanish) was "highly variable" and everyone in the city spoke or at least understood 2 languages:

"We wanted to take advantage of this variability, and instead of comparing monolingual and bilingual people, we looked at whether in Barcelona – where everyone is more or less bilingual – there was a certain degree of bilingualism that had neuroprotective benefits."

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#23
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On priors and given how they sample, I'm guessing it's just p-hacking.

I cant find the episode now, but a few years ago an episode CBC's science show Quirks and Quarks interviewed a researcher that found being bilingual seemed to delay the onset of dementia by a couple of years. Although it doesnt sound like much, from a public policy pov, its pretty significant when you look at what that can mean for quality of life as well as costs for our public health system.

I wonder if knowing one language delays the onset of dementia by X. then being bilingual delays dementia by X/2. then being trilingual delays dementia by X/3. and so on ...

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#24
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I haven’t read the paper but how can you control for correlated stuff here, e.g. bilingual people are likely to be richer, more intelligent, exercise more, eat better more varied food and have richer social lives. Maybe.

Are immigrants and their children likely to be richer, eat better, etc?

There would need to be research done, nothing has been said if these people were all immigrants to Barcelona or the wages they were on, my guess is they are probably not truly random and replication will be difficult if we chose say bilingual in Wales, for example.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#26
post #3

> They recruited 63 healthy individuals, 135 patients with mild cognitive impairment such as memory loss, and 68 people with Alzheimer's – the most prevalent type of dementia – in four hospitals in Barcelona and the metropolitan area Wait so, N = 266? All from Barcelona? C'mon.

N = 266 isn't really that bad at all

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#27

Is it correlation or causation tho?

Another study in Italy that found a similar result. This one included brain scans that apparently indicate structural differences

https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2018-05-15/bilingual-brai...

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I haven’t read the paper but how can you control for correlated stuff here, e.g. bilingual people are likely to be richer, more intelligent, exercise more, eat better more varied food and have richer social lives. Maybe.

This is why they chose Barcelona, where the use of 2 languages (Catalan and Spanish) was "highly variable" and everyone in the city spoke or at least understood 2 languages: "We wanted to take advantage of this variability, and instead of comparing monolingual and bilingual people, we looked at whether in Barcelona – where everyone is more or less bilingual – there was a certain degree of bilingualism that had neurop…

I think this doesn’t disprove the theory I’ve set out that people who know more languages than the average local population are likely to have other markers correlated with lower Alzheimer’s risk.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#30

What does bilingualism correlate with?

If I'm not mistaken, speaking two languages in Spain is quite common. The country has multiple languages besides Spanish [1]. So I guess it doesn't correlate with much aside from the geographic region.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Spain

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