ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 21, 1996 TAG: 9602210058
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: SHANKAR VEDANTAM\KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE NOTE: Below
NEW STUDY SUGGESTS brain-training might be a protection.
Read this article carefully. It may help to save your life.
A new study out this week suggests that poor writing skills powerfully predict whether a person will get Alzheimer's disease. While it's not known how one affects the other, the study's author thinks boosting these skills - by reading and writing - may build the brain's ability to protect itself.
``Alzheimer's is a thinking disease,'' said David Snowdon, associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. ``It seems plausible that if you can develop your thinking ability, your thinking reserve, you might be protected against thinking diseases later on.''
``The way you use words reflects a fundamental way you do your thinking,'' he said. ``Language may be a marker of general mental ability.''
Snowdon's study appears in this week's edition of The Journal of the American Medical Association. For reasons that will soon become clear, he calls it the ``nun study.'' Alzheimer's is an incurable, degenerative brain disease. It tends to afflict older people and is characterized by the loss of memory, language ability and mental skills.
Researchers studied a group of 93 nuns in Milwaukee, of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. By comparing the nuns' ability to write essays when they were in their 20s - an average of 58 years ago - and whether they had developed Alzheimer's, they found that weak language skills in early life was closely linked to the development of the disease later on.
When the scientists conducted autopsies on the brains of 25 nuns who had died - 10 of whom had Alzheimer's - the correlation between brain lesions due to the disease and early language weaknesses was equally powerful.
``Ninety percent of those with Alzheimer's had low language ability versus 13 percent without Alzheimer's who had low linguistic ability,'' Snowdon said.
Why nuns?
``There's so little known about Alzheimer's disease largely because the people have a memory disorder and can't tell you about their past,'' Snowdon said. ``The sisters represented a way to get a view of Alzheimer's patients' early lives.''
The sisters had baptismal records, grade school records and essays. Each of the 93 nuns in the study had been asked to write an autobiography between 1931 and 1939, when they were, on average, 22 years old.
Researchers studied the quality of the essays and rated them for vocabulary, general knowledge, number of ideas, writing skill and other factors.
The nuns also were excellent candidates for study because they had agreed to donate their brains for research after death, something few healthy people are willing to do, Snowdon said.
``A lot of the confounding factors have been held constant,'' Snowdon went on, referring to lifestyle factors that might have skewed the results, ``cigarette smoking, drinking, differences in health care.''
The nuns, he added delicately, also had ``similar reproductive habits,'' all of which made the group ``a model of aging and disease that is well controlled.''
The study, however, raised more questions than it answered.
``We know that linguistic ability is strikingly related to Alzheimer's later in life,'' Snowdon said. ``The question is that it's a chicken and egg thing.''
In other words, did the seeds of Alzheimer's in the nuns' early lives make them weaker in language skills? That would mean the disease is a lifelong process that becomes visible only in later life.
Or does weak linguistic ability actually make the brain more vulnerable? That would mean that strong language ability, which can be developed by education and training, can protect people against disease.
``If you start using your brain or writing letters, will it forestall Alzheimer's?'' Snowdon said it may be too soon to answer that. It's possible that linguistic ability may be only one indicator of the risk of Alzheimer's in later life. It likely will be many years before researchers predict anyone's risk of getting the disease from early writings.
``But rather than wait decades, how could we lose by encouraging young people to develop their brain and thinking abilities?'' Snowdon asked. ``We don't think twice about encouraging young people to develop physically, yet what could be more important than the brain, than what makes us human?''
LENGTH: Medium: 84 linesby CNB