Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Washington, she said: “It won’t stop you getting Alzheimer’s disease but you can cope with the disease for longer. Switching between languages is a stimulating activity — it is like carrying out brain exercises which builds up higher levels of what we call brain or cognitive reserve.
“It is rather like a reserve tank in a car. When you run out of fuel, you can keep going for longer because there is a bit more in the safety tank.”
She said that learning a language was a more powerful version of taking up crosswords or Sudoku to keep the brain active. Dr Bialystok and her colleagues looked at the medical records of 228 patients who had been diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s and compared them to their language abilities.
She found that on average monolingual people made their first doctor’s appointment to address Alzheimer’s symptoms aged 71.4, compared with 75.5 for bilingual people. Monolingual people first reported symptoms aged 75.4 compared with closer to 80 for the bilingual.
Dr Bialystok said that being bilingual boosted an area of the brain known as the “executive control system” in the frontal lobe that governs memory, learning, language and reasoning.
She said that learning a language, especially as a child, made this area more powerful and flexible and therefore more resistant to damage. Dr Bialystok said that her researchers were carrying out studies to see if using two or more languages physically changed the brain and made some areas larger.
Approximately 650,000 Britons have dementia with the vast majority suffering from Alzheimer’s. This figure is expected to rise by 70 per cent within 20 years.
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