Learning a new skill or taking up a new language could lower the risk for cognitive decline and dementia, according to a study out Aug. 23 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,” Hikaru Takeuchi, a researcher at Tohoku University in Japan, the study’s first author, said in a statement. “Adult education is likewise associated with better preservation of nonverbal reasoning with increasing age.”
His team looked at data from the UK Biobank. It examined data from 282,421 British volunteers in the data collection. The people were between 40 and 69 when they were enrolled, which was between 2006 and 2010. On average, Takeuchi followed them for seven years.
Researchers gave people a “polygenic risk score” for dementia based on factors in their DNA. The people reported if they took any adult education classes, but didn’t say the level, subject or how often they participated in a class. They evaluated data from when the people were given cognitive and psychological tests, which was between 2014 and 2018.
Throughout the course of the study, 1.1% of people developed dementia. The scientists say that people who participated in adult education had a 19% lower risk of developing dementia than participants who didn’t take adult education classes. The results were the same across ethnicities. They were also similar when the scientists excluded people with other comorbidities such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, mental illness and other ailments.
People who took courses had maintained their fluid intelligence and nonverbal reasoning performance better than those who didn’t take classes. However, classes didn’t affect the preservation of visuospatial memory or reaction time.
“One possibility is that engaging in intellectual activities has positive results on the nervous system, which in turn may prevent dementia,” said Ryuta Kawashima, a professor from Tohoku University who worked with Takeuchi on the study. “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.”
Next, a randomized clinical trial would be needed to see if adult education truly offers protection from cognitive decline, Takeuchi said.
“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,“ Takeuchi noted.
