Education can delay Alzheimer’s disease symptoms

Washington, November 14: A study has revealed that people who with higher educational level have delayed onset of symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

According to this study by scientists at the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, some educated participants, despite having brain plaques related to long-term Alzheimer’s disease, managed to obtain high scores on cognitive ability tests.

Catherine Roe, Ph. D., one of the authors of the study and a research instructor in neurology stated: "The good news is that greater education may allow people to harbor amyloid plaques and other brain pathology linked to Alzheimer's disease without experiencing decline of their cognitive abilities."

Together with her colleagues, Roe observed participants of the study in order to prove the “cognitive reserve” hypothesis, which states that increased thinking, learning and memory capacity can result from using the brain regularly.

The researchers observed 37 participants who were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s-like dementia and 161 participants without dementia. They then obtained each of the participant’s educational history and cognitive ability test scores, which equated to their cognitive reserve.

The participants were injected with carbon 11-labeled Pittsburg compound (PiB), which adheres to beta-amyloid brain plaques connected with Alzheimer’s disease, before finally undergoing a positron emission tomographydefine scan.

According to Roe, "This technique has been used before to analyze patients with dementia and their education levels, but our study is among the first, if not the first, to include both patients with Alzheimer's-type dementia and non-demented participants.”

The results of the study showed that participants with little or no plaque build-up did well on the tests as expected. The significant observation obtained is that while most participants with high plaque build-up did poorly on the test, those participants with a high plaque build-up that had undergone post-graduate work still managed to obtain high scores.

"The results support the hypothesis that cognitive reserve influences the association between Alzheimer disease pathological burden and cognition," reported Roe.

Roe and her team plans to make further studies that will include hobbies, professional duties, and social activities as indicators of cognitive reserve.