People taking adult education classes run lower risk of dementia

How can we best keep our brain fit as we grow older? It’s well known that regular cognitive activity, for example brainteasers, sudokus, or certain video games in middle and old age tends to protect against cognitive decline and dementias like Alzheimer’s. But many of us regularly engage in adult education classes, for example learning a language or a new skill. Is such adult education likewise associated with a lower risk of cognitive decline and dementia?

Yes, according to Japanese researchers whose study is Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.

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

The researchers analyzed data from the UK Biobank, which holds genetic, health, and medical information from approximately half a million British volunteers, of which 282,421 participants were analyzed for this study. These had been enrolled between 2006 and 2010, when between 40 and 69 years old. On average, they had been followed for seven years by the time of the present study.

Based on their genotype at 133 relevant single-locus polymorphisms (SNPs) in their DNA, participants were given an individual predictive ‘polygenic risk score’ for dementia. Participants self-reported if they took any adult education classes, without specifying the frequency, subject, or academic level.

The study’s authors focused on data from the enrollment visit and third assessment visit, between 2014 and 2018. At those visits, participants were given a battery of psychological and cognitive tests, for example for fluid intelligence, visuospatial memory, and reaction time.

1.1% of participants in the sample developed dementia over the study’s time window.

The researchers showed that participants who were taking part in adult education at enrollment had 19% lower risk of developing dementia than participants who did not. This held true for both Caucasian people and those of other ethnicities.

Importantly, results were similar when participants with a history of diabetes, hyperlipidemia, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, or mental illness were excluded. This means that the observed lower risk wasn’t exclusively due to participants with incipient dementia being prevented from following adult education by symptoms of these known co-morbidities.

The results also showed that participants who took part in adult education classes kept up their fluid intelligence and nonverbal reasoning performance better than peers who did not. However, adult education 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 the researchers. “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.”

So, what? The brain is a learning machine. It was designed to learn new things throughout life and earlier studies reported in TR have shown that when it stops learning it begins to die. Other research (also reported in TR) has shown that continuous learning increases longevity.