Bilingualism delays onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms Researchers at
St. Michael's Hospital and the University of Toronto have found
that people who speak more than one language don’t exhibit
symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease until they have twice as much
brain damage as unilingual people. It's the first physical
evidence that bilingualism delays the onset of the disease.
“This is unheard of – no medicine comes close to delaying the
onset of symptoms and now we have the evidence to prove this at
the neuroanatomical level,” said Professor Tom Schweizer, a
neuroscientist who headed the research. Schweizer’s team studied
CT scans of patients who had been diagnosed with probable
Alzheimer’s disease and who had similar levels of education and
cognitive skills, such as attention, memory, planning and
organization. Half were fluently bilingual; the other half
unilingual. Despite the fact that both groups performed
equivalently on all measures of cognitive performance, the scans
of the bilingual patients showed twice as mu