Can learning a new language stave off dementia?
Research suggests bilingual people enjoy cognitive benefits later in life.
My father decided to start learning French when he was 57. He hired a tutor to meet with him twice a week and diligently completed his homework before every lesson. Before long, he was visiting the French bakery across town to practice his pronunciation (and buy macarons). Now, two decades later, he’s on his third tutor.
On the surface, his retirement hobby seems a little random – our family has no connection to French-speaking countries – but his motivation ran deeper than a passion for pastries. My grandmother developed signs of Alzheimer’s disease in her early 70s, and studies suggest being bilingual can delay the onset of the condition by up to five years.
Why your memory goes downhill after 30 – and how to reboot it
Over a month Laurel Ives embarked upon a memory bootcamp of puzzles, diet changes and supplements. Here are the results.
Forgetting names, finding myself on the wrong tube, searching for my keys while holding them – as I’ve hit middle age I find memory lapses seem to have become increasingly frequent.
It’s almost comical how long it can take my friends and I to remember the name of an actor, a movie title or the plot of a book. What is going on? Am I on the grim road to dementia? And is it possible to reboot my memory and restore it to an earlier, sharper form?
Dr Tim Beanland is head of knowledge at the Alzheimer’s Society and author of the puzzle book, Mind Games.
“People think if their memory is getting a little bit worse they must have dementia. But a bit of memory loss is normal. Your brain is part of your body and you wouldn’t expect your skin, for example, to be the same as when you were 20 – it’s the same for your brain. It’s normal to become a bit more distractible and to find it harder to hold onto things like names,” he says.
Dementia is on a different scale from normal memory loss, however. “If I just told you something and you then asked me for the same information within two to five minutes, that would be dementia – when people stop being able to form memories. Instead of forgetting where you parked your car, people with dementia would ask: ‘Did I come by car or bus?’
“Dementia affects your ability to do your job and socialise – there’s a big difference in scale,” says Beanland.
How to optimise your brain health if you’re at risk of developing Alzheimer’s
A test showed me I’m at high risk for the disease. Now I’m doing all I can to optimise my brain health.
To me, the A-word is as bad as the C-word. When my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the age of 80, I brushed off every time he forgot me as a joke. In reality, I was broken-hearted, as he was too, by the disease that robbed him of who he had been. Seeing what he went through pushed me to sign up as a volunteer for Alzheimer’s research, which in 2021 showed I, too, was at high risk of developing it.
When I got the call from the clinic, I went into complete shock. I had undergone memory testing that showed I had no issues with cognition, and joked with a friend that I’d signed up to the trial only for the free Pret sandwiches.
I never expected to learn I had two copies of the APOE4 gene. This, I was told, gives me a 75% chance of developing Alzheimer’s, but there’s no way of knowing if and when that might happen.
Three years later, I think I’m still in denial about the result. Every time I forget something, I wonder: “Is this a sign that my memory is starting to go?” I had a stroke in 2022; I honestly think I was so anxious about the result, I burst my own brain.
Is Alzheimer’s the same as dementia? A brain expert explains
Alzheimer’s is a disease that occurs in your brain. It’s characterised by brain shrinkage, which is caused by brain cells progressively dying, and the accumulation of plaques and tangles, the two major hallmarks or pathologies of Alzheimer’s.
It was first described by the German psychiatrist and pathologist Alois Alzheimer in 1906.
To be clear, Alzheimer’s is a brain disease that causes dementia. Dementia is not a disease per se, it’s a set of symptoms that can be caused by lots of different diseases. Alzheimer’s is the most common cause, but you can have dementia symptoms because of other diseases such as vascular dementia or frontotemporal dementia, for example.
Can supplements really help prevent dementia?
It is estimated more than 1 million people in Britain will have a diagnosis of dementia by 2025. It’s a sobering thought, but new research suggests 40% of these cases could be delayed or prevented by prioritising a healthy and active lifestyle.
Although this sounds encouraging, losing weight, getting fit and drinking less alcohol are noble goals that require a level of commitment that many of us struggle to sustain. So, it’s hardly surprising we’re increasingly inclined to reach for vitamins and supplements to try to stave off memory loss – especially if we can’t quite manage to surrender all our bad habits.
According to US figures, the global brain health supplements market was valued at US$7.6 billion ($12.3b) in 2021, and is expected to reach US$15.59b by 2030, driven by an ageing population desperate to find out how to prevent dementia.
To help with dementia, you have to enter your loved one’s reality
It can be fearsome and difficult to see a loved one changing – but there are ways to connect with them.
A big misconception is that dementia is part of ageing. Misplacing things, or forgetting to pay a bill, often comes with growing older – because our brain doesn’t tend to function as well at 80 as it used to at 21. But that’s not dementia. Dementia is a progressive condition that causes gradual cognitive decline that may affect personality and the person’s daily living. It’s an umbrella term – there are more than 200 types – and all affect memory. There is no cure, although medication can sometimes help with the symptoms.
What often happens is that a couple are plodding along together at home. Over time, one partner has started to take over some of the tasks that the other is no longer very good at. It might be, “You always make a mess when you cook. So I’ll do it.” And so it goes on. No one else sees it happening. The more-able partner doesn’t even see it because it’s their daily reality – like the note stuck on the fridge that you simply stop seeing, even though it’s neon pink.
Then a son or daughter visits and they haven’t seen their parents for, say, three months. And immediately it’s, “What’s going on with Dad?” “Oh, it’s just your Dad.” But it’s not “just Dad”. They can see that something is going on. We think of the big things that might suggest dementia, such as wandering out at night or forgetting how to start the car. However, the brain is incredible at adapting and compensating. So it’s likely that, by the time a big thing happens, the person is further along on their dementia journey than they – or anyone else – realises.
The day a top newsreader found out he had dementia
He can’t read a clock face or do up his shoelaces. But Alastair Stewart can still remember what it was like to be one of Britain’s leading broadcasters. Andrew Billen meets him at home.
Doctors set some store by how patients “present”, although they are wary too as appearances can be deceptive. Today I shall discover how one of Britain’s most familiar news presenters currently presents. When Alastair Stewart retired from GB News a year ago, he had been presenting news bulletins for almost 50 years. As it matured over the decades, his style on ITV became unmistakable: its cigarette-charred timbre; its vigorously attacking approach to sentences. But how will he perform for me this morning, seven months after he announced that he has dementia? He knows people will be interested. Some will perhaps be voyeuristically so. Stewart’s youngest son has already joked that his greeting to me should be, “I can’t remember what we’re talking about.”
“So there is space for mirth and black humour,” says Stewart, who will soon be unerringly plucking from his mental filing cabinet the names of former colleagues, mentors, politicians, even the chief antagonists of 80ss Poland, Lech Walesa and General Jaruzelski.
“Oh, wind him up and off he goes,” says Sally, his wife of 46 years, who for fact-checking purposes is sharing a sofa with me in the sitting room of their charming farmhouse home in Stewart’s native Hampshire. They met at Southern Television where he had his first job. As a production assistant, she would sometimes tell him down his earpiece to stop talking. They have brought up three sons and a daughter. Now, in his armchair opposite, Stewart, 71 and sporting a brace of hearing aids, answers my questions brilliantly.
A drug to slow Alzheimer’s is finally available. How are patients faring?
Over the past three years, a new class of Alzheimer’s drug, the first to treat a root cause of the disease, has set off a roller coaster of hope and disappointment. But while these so-called anti-amyloid antibodies had a rough start, many patients and their doctors are feeling more optimistic now that one of the medications is finally being used more widely.
Lecanemab (brand name Leqembi; pronounced le-KEM-bee) was given full approval by the US Food and Drug Administration in July 2023 and is currently the only one of its class available to Alzheimer’s patients, outside clinical trials. The drug has been shown to slow the progression of the disease, but its benefits are fairly modest. It is also a burdensome therapy and has a high risk of troubling side effects.
With lecanemab having been approved for nearly a year – and with a similar drug, donanemab, recommended for approval by an FDA advisory committee – the New York Times checked in with experts at three major medical centres about who’s receiving lecanemab and how they’re responding.
Despite her advanced Alzheimer’s, the woman I love is still in there
Brit Hugh Webb met his Kiwi wife Lorraine in New Zealand 55 years ago. She has lived with advanced dementia for more than a decade, but he remains devoted to her.
My darling wife Lorraine can no longer walk or talk and is doubly incontinent. She now lives in a hospital bed in our Surrey front room. And yet, despite the fact Alzheimer’s disease has taken so much from her, the woman I fell in love with is still there. Lorraine may not recognise me – sometimes she looks at me and doesn’t even see me – but she still giggles at the sound of my voice, and smiles when I play our favourite classical music, the Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia from Spartacus. We are both now 77, and ours is a love story that has lasted almost 60 years.
Till dementia do us part: The heartbreak of putting a sick spouse into care
Even as the signals of approaching dementia became impossible to ignore, Joseph Drolet dreaded the prospect of moving his partner into a long-term care facility.
Drolet, 79, and his beloved Rebecca, 71, both retired lawyers and prosecutors in Atlanta, US, had been a couple for 33 years, though they retained separate homes. In 2019, she began getting lost while driving, mishandling her finances and struggling with the television remote. The diagnosis, Alzheimer’s disease, came in 2021.
Over time, Drolet moved Rebecca (whose surname he asked to withhold to protect her privacy) into his home. But serving as her round-the-clock caregiver, as she needed help with every daily task, became exhausting and untenable. Rebecca began wandering their neighbourhood and “getting dressed in the middle of the night, preparing for trips that weren’t happening”, Drolet recalled.
Last year, when he determined that Rebecca no longer really knew where she was, he felt it was time to move her to a memory-care residence in a nearby assisted-living facility.
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