Bilinguals show evidence of brain maintenance in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

We examined brain and cognitive reserve related to bilingualism in older adults with, or at-risk for, Alzheimer's disease (AD) from the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging and the Quebec Consortium for the Early Identification of Alzheimer's Disease. We used surface-based morphometry methods to measure cortical thickness and volume of language-related and AD-related brain regions. We did not observe evidence of brain reserve in language-related regions. However, reduced hippocampal volume was observed for monolingual, but not bilingual, older adults with AD. Thus, bilingualism is hypothesized to contribute to reserve in the form of brain maintenance in the context of AD.