Language linked to Alzheimer's disease

The researchers claim that women who put their pen to paper and scribbled facts and rich-fluent essays, when young, do not encounter problems like memory loss in later life.

Analysis of essays
For the purpose of the study, the researchers scrutinized the brains of 38 deceased Catholic nuns. These nuns were part of a continuing medical study of Catholic sisters of the School Sisters of Notre Dame worshippers, residing in the U.S.

Scientists categorized the 38 nuns into two categories. First group had nuns with memory problems and Alzheimer's disease hallmark in the brain and the second group comprised of nuns who had normal memory with or without signs of Alzheimer's disease in the brain.

The analysis centered on the essays written by 14 participants during their late teens or early 20's. The study tried to enumerate the average number of ideas articulated per 10 words in the essays. The complexity of the grammar was also gauged in each essay.

The inherent protective mechanism
The results revealed that women devoid of memory problems scored 20 percent higher on language tests as compared to their counterparts who encountered memory issues. The grammar score, on the other hand, did not show any dissimilarity between the two factions.

Study author Dr. Diego Iacono, a research fellow in neuropathology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore noted, “The novelty is that these people were normal (cognitively) but they have Alzheimer's disease pathology like the people with dementia."

“It's amazing that, even though you have a certain amount of pathology in your brain, you are not demented. You have some protective mechanism,” he added.

Researcher Dr. Juan Troncoso averred, "Our results show that an intellectual ability test in the early 20s may predict the likelihood of remaining cognitively normal five or six decades later, even in the presence of a large amount of Alzheimer's disease pathology."

The present study has been published in the journal Neurology.