“Lesser risk of Dementia with Adult Education” says Research

How can we best maintain our brains in shape as we age? Regular cognitive engagement, such as brain teasers, sudoku, or some video games, is widely established to protect against cognitive decline and dementias such as Alzheimer’s in middle and old age. However, many of us attend adult education classes on a regular basis, for example, to learn a language or a new skill. Is this type of adult education also linked to a lower incidence of cognitive decline and dementia?

Yes, according to researchers from Tohoku University’s Institute of Development, Aging, and Cancer in Sendai, Japan, who demonstrated for the first time in a recent study published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.

“Here we show that people who take adult education classes have a lower risk of developing dementia five years later,” stated the study’s first author, Dr. Hikaru Takeuchi. “Adult education is likewise associated with better preservation of nonverbal reasoning with increasing age.”

The UK Biobank:

Takeuchi and his co-author, Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, a professor at the same institute, evaluated data from the UK Biobank, which has genetic, health, and medical information on roughly 500,000 British volunteers, of whom 282,421 were analyzed for this study. These people were enrolled between 2006 and 2010, when they were between the ages of 40 and 69. By the time the current study was conducted, they had been observed for an average of seven years.

Participants were given an individual predicted “polygenic risk score” for dementia based on their genotype at 133 significant single-locus polymorphisms (SNPs) in their DNA. Participants self-reported whether or not they completed adult education classes, but did not specify the frequency, subject matter, or academic level.

Between 2014 and 2018, the authors focused on data from the enrollment visit and the third assessment visit. Participants were given a battery of psychological and cognitive assessments during those sessions, including measures for fluid intelligence, visuospatial memory, and response time.

Over the course of the trial, 1.1% of the patients got dementia.

Reduced likelihood of developing dementia:

Takeuchi and Kawashima discovered that those who were enrolled in adult education had a 19% lower risk of getting dementia than those who were not. This was true for both Caucasians and persons of other ethnicities.

Importantly, when people with a history of diabetes, hyperlipidemia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, or mental illness were eliminated, the results remained identical. This implies that the observed lower risk was not solely due to people with early-stage dementia being deterred from pursuing adult education due to symptoms of these established co-morbidities.

The findings also revealed that participants who attended adult education programs maintained their fluid intelligence and nonverbal reasoning abilities better than their peers who did not. Adult education, on the other hand, had no effect on the preservation of visuospatial memory or reaction time.

Randomized clinical studies are required:

Kawashima mentioned,  “One possibility is that engaging in intellectual activities has positive results on the nervous system, which in turn may prevent dementia. But ours is an observational longitudinal study, so if a direct causal relationship exists between adult education and a lower risk of dementia, it could be in either direction”.

To demonstrate any preventive impact of adult education, Takeuchi advocated conducting a randomized clinical trial.

He also added, “This could take the form of a controlled trial where one group of participants is encouraged to participate in an adult education class, while the other is encouraged to participate in a control intervention with equivalent social interaction, but without education”.

Source link