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Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment
- diqwndwqiond 6y agoIs it correlation or causation tho?
- jedberg 6y agoLooks correlative but it highly correlates, and they did seem to eliminate a lot of confounding factors.
- pmichaud 6y agoOn priors and given how they sample, I'm guessing it's just p-hacking.
- mdtancsa 6y agoI cant find the episode now, but a few years ago an episode CBC's science show Quirks and Quarks interviewed a researcher that found being bilingual seemed to delay the onset of dementia by a couple of years. Although it doesnt sound like much, from a public policy pov, its pretty significant when you look at what that can mean for quality of life as well as costs for our public health system.
- diqwndwqiond 6y agoI wonder if knowing one language delays the onset of dementia by X. then being bilingual delays dementia by X/2. then being trilingual delays dementia by X/3. and so on ...
- golem14 6y agoUnfortunately, you can't take an 50-something english only American and tell him to "go learn Italian", for health. It's hard enough to make people eat less, exercise, or quit smoking - picking up new language without another motivation than "for health" is going to be even harder. Most schools introduce more languages today, no ? And I guess there is no motivation to keep language skills active beyond school, so any skill here will likely atrophy like me French :(
- 082349872349872 6y agoHas NAFTA not meant that one can, even without internet, practise french and spanish from food packaging? I enjoyed Bon Cop Bad Cop (2006), a bilingual flick which IIRC can be found with either english or french subs.
- mdtancsa 6y agoits been a while since I heard the doc, but I dont think it was so much a "lets all learn another language" as opposed to looking what might be happening in the brain to cause such an odd disparity in how the disease manifests itself.
- another1oror 6y agoAnother study in Italy that found a similar result. This one included brain scans that apparently indicate structural differences https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2018-05-15/bilingual-brains-are-more-resilient-dementia-cause-alzheimers-disease https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2018-05-15/bilingual-brai...
- blackbrokkoli 6y agoYou can't get causation from an observation study. You can however get a lot of attention for "finding" a causation. So to answer your question, it's quacks selling correlation as causation.
- trimbo 6y ago> They recruited 63 healthy individuals, 135 patients with mild cognitive impairment such as memory loss, and 68 people with Alzheimer's – the most prevalent type of dementia – in four hospitals in Barcelona and the metropolitan area Wait so, N = 266? All from Barcelona? C'mon.
- ip26 6y agoWith proper random sampling you only need something like N = 27 (I forget exactly) to reach p = 0.05 Assuming random sampling, it's a misconception that you need ten thousand participants to have a useful study.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoCue “p = 0.05 is a random choice” and a big thread about p-hacking. Any takers? It feels like everything to say has already been said about the bias of small sample sizes and the dangers of p-hacking. But it also seems like the discussion is inevitable here. I wonder if there’s a new insight to glean, somehow... For a background on why p-values are misleading, see https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q which is excellent. He points out that 0.05 was selected by Ronald Fischer in 1925, and people have gone with it since.
- im3w1l 6y agoThe reason we have stuck with it ever since it s because it's a decent cutoff. I think in physics they sometimes use a much higher threshold of 5 sigma. Presumably because having much more data means they can afford to.
- outlace 6y agoA 5% false positive rate can be pretty high depending on the situation, like whether or not a drug is effective.
- bluejellybean 6y agoIsn't the crux just that, "proper random sampling" can be quite hard. Assumptions are fine in theory, in reality, they can seriously throw us for a loop.
- roenxi 6y agoInteresting and suggestive, but difficult to interpret from the publicly available information. Actively speaking two languages no doubt implies complex correlations between wealth, status and circumstance. The paper abstract doesn't mention controlling for location. That would also be an interesting thing to test.
- jedberg 6y agoOne of the first things it mentions is controlling for location -- they were all in Barcelona.
- bobthepanda 6y agoWhich basically makes this a study of Catalan-Spanish bilingualism. It would be interesting to see if this also applied to other combinations of languages.
- 7thaccount 6y agoOr just not being someone born in the USA to non first generation parents.
- kingkawn 6y agoThe study is in Spain.
- 7thaccount 6y agoI got that. I was responding to someone saying speaking 2 languages correlates with wealth. I'm not sure how true that is as being bilingual is extremely common outside of the US.
- umanwizard 6y agoSome googling suggests that about half the world population is bilingual. Certainly more than the rate in the US, but it's a bit of an exaggeration to imply that everyone in the world is bilingual except for the backwards Yanks.
- Wolfenstein98k 6y agoWhat does bilingualism correlate with?
- k__ 6y agoImmigration? Going to a school in Europe? Living as a minority with its own language in a country with another language?
- smt88 6y agoIt depends on the country. In many countries, wealthier students receive more instruction in a foreign language and have access to full immersion programs.
- miltondts 6y agoIf I'm not mistaken, speaking two languages in Spain is quite common. The country has multiple languages besides Spanish [1]. So I guess it doesn't correlate with much aside from the geographic region. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Spain
- pvaldes 6y agoSpeaking three is common, but there is often an appreciable and even obvious erosion in the mastery of some of them (limited vocabulary, misspellings..., mobile phones made lot of damage also in this field). We need to be aware of this point also Having a logically structured thinking or being good in math (all related with having dementia or not) does not depend on how many times you can say 'street' in different languages.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoI understand the concerns about p-value but the causal pathway is such a clear one (make brain work harder each day and it stays elastic and effective longer) that this should be a slam dunk for more research grants
- maroonblazer 6y ago>make brain work harder each day and it stays elastic and effective longer Would this extend to learning in general? E.g. learning more than one musical instrument?
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoI don't know - that's why I think more funding is needed. Directing that funding against likely targets seems a sensible idea. Until someone finds some bacterial or pathogen cause for Alzheimer's and dementia, funding should go on the "we don't use it we lose it" assumption. Yes there may be other factors of course, and given the surprise over stomach ulcers it's entirely possible the use it or lose it idea is wrong. But science funding needs to be a smart money play not a scattergun.
- medymed 6y agoThe causal pathway is exceeding clear with sufficient wishful thinking.
- yosito 6y ago> the ~~causal pathway~~ hypothesis is such a clear one
- aurelianito 6y agoAlmost everyone is bilingual in Barcelona. They teach Catalan and Spanish at school, and both are spoken by the general population. How did they get non-bilingual people there?
- lolc 6y ago"Therefore, unlike in previous studies, the researchers established a bilingualism gradient: from people who speak only one language but are passively exposed to another, to individuals who have excellent proficiency in both and use them indiscriminately on a day-to-day basis. To create this gradient, several variables were taken into account, including the age of acquisition of the second language, the use made of each language, and switching between languages in the same context."
- asveikau 6y agoI would expect there to be a fair amount of monolingual Castilian speakers there too. People who moved there from another part of Spain for instance.
- aurelianito 6y agoIf they tapped into this population they wouldn't be able to make any valid conclusion because they are intrinsically different.
- boulos 6y agoThe title has been editorialized unfortunately. The page uses Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment which is an important summary of the paper: everyone in the study is basically bilingual, but the bilingual composite score (how bilingual you are / how much you actively speak and switch languages) is suggested as a precursor of delayed cognitive decline. The title of the original paper is Active bilingualism delays the onset of mild cognitive impairment which is also clear, if a little stilted as a headline.
- dang 6y agoAh thanks. We've changed the title now. Submitted title was "Dementia 50% lower in bilingual populations". Submitters: please follow the site guidelines, which include: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ummonk 6y agoSeems like something that could easily have causation going the other way (or having a common cause) no? E.g. perhaps people who end up having cognitive impairment stop regularly speaking both languages because it's harder to do so when suffering cognitive decline.
- carbocation 6y agoTable 1 shows various demographic factors broken down by disease vs no disease. But since they're making claims about bilingualism vs no bilingualism, we also need to see a "Table 1" equivalent for those two categories, so we can understand at a glance which confounders are correlated with these values. Secondarily, it's a bit concerning (for their hypothesis) that bilingualism is associated with less mild cognitive impairment but not with the more severe dementia phenotype.
- kace91 6y agoThis might be me being overly cautious here, but I would be wary of the political implications of the study. It's from an open University that's a project for lifelong learning funded as a public service in Catalonia - promoting the catalan language in the region is a key point of the project, so studies finding out that bilingualism is something great to have raise red flags about the nationalist agenda behind it. To be clear, I'm not trying to make a point against catalan people or taking a position in any political side whatsoever. I'm just pointing out the potential for local context affecting the scientific method here.
- kiliancs 6y agoIt is a common point of view from modern Catalan nationalism that the bilingual status-quo is conducive to the minoritization of the Catalan language long term. Bilingualism can also mean Catalan and English. On the other hand, pro-union parties [0] and organizations [1] often defend bilingualism under the opposite premise: that supposedly Catalan has an advantageous position over Spanish. [0] https://www.elmundo.es/cataluna/2019/04/25/5cc192b4fdddff712d8b464b.html https://www.elmundo.es/cataluna/2019/04/25/5cc192b4fdddff712... [1] http://convivenciacivicacatalana.blogspot.com/p/administracion-bilingue.html http://convivenciacivicacatalana.blogspot.com/p/administraci...
- lottin 6y agoIf you see past the rhetoric you will find that Catalan nationalists would like Catalan to be the dominant language in Catalonia while Spanish nationalists would like Spanish to be the dominant language instead. Neither of them are really concerned about English because English is not in a position to replace either Catalan or Spanish.
- pvaldes 6y agoReplace "spanish nationalists" by "everybody else" and you have it. The idea that the main language of a nation, the only that everybody share and knows, should be deterred from part of the territory is surrealist.
- cube00 6y agoHopefully code is counted as a language so I'll have a 50% lower risk too.
- mikeomoto 6y agoThis study tries to explain why "some studies have failed to show this bilingual advantage, suggesting that it might depend on the type and degree of bilingualism", by laying out evidence for the "type and degree of bilingualism. Here are the facts that the article established: - Lifelong degree of bilingualism predicts delay in age of onset for all clinical measure of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). - This is NOT true for Alzheimer's Disease patients. - This prediction was independent of occupation, education, and job attainment. The second bullet point isn't properly emphasized in the article, but it's directly from the abstract. The researcher has a hypothesis that multilingualism improves Cognitive Reserve [1], and, and Cognitive Reserve has already been established to have an effect on the timeline of Alzheimer's disease related pathology. [2] That being said, it's also true that "AD is the most common etiology of MCI and mild dementia" [3], and the researcher has a hypothesis that the multilingualism improves Cognitive Reserve. Based on the existing hypothesis of how CR and AD interact, the lack of correlation in AD patients could make sense, and should not be seen as counter-evidence to the bilingualism increases CR hypothesis. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reserve [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3507991/#S2title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3507991/#S2titl... [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4185370/#S5title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4185370/#S5titl...
- ekianjo 6y agoHow do you go from studying Catalan and Spanish bilinguism and make a broad generalization To "speaking two langages" ? We dont know how this translates to other forms of bilinguism at all.
- ekianjo 6y agoThis paper suggest causal effect but they have nothing but correlation. There may be other factord at play between people who are bilingual and those who are not. Would be surprising to say the least that one variable explains differences in dementia outcomes...
- tumblewit 6y agoIn India almost every school teaches you more than one language and due to the diversity in India most kids actively speak two languages. Not only that but as an adult it is also common in workplaces.
- jay_kyburz 6y agoDo you think Python and JavaScript Count?
- 082349872349872 6y agoFosho na foriya. Mi peroba lang belta fo da razhdang xiya. :-)
- majkinetor 6y agoI am sure that everything counts. Scientists like to measure natural language against dementia probably because its easier to do then some other form of knowledge (like being good in multiple disciplines). From the practical standpoint, learning more then 1 one language doesn't make any sense - practical value you get from it is next to 0 compared to for example learning medicine, electronics, IT, math etc. Especially because it requires the same amount of time.
- luckylion 6y ago> From the practical standpoint, learning more then 1 one language doesn't make any sense - practical value you get from it is next to 0 compared to for example learning medicine, electronics, IT, math etc. That may be true if you're living in a country where English is the main language, otherwise adding English has a lot of practical value.
- anon4242 6y agoOr, if you're not a native English speaker who moves to another country where English is not the main language then adding that language tend to have a lot of practical value.
- 082349872349872 6y agoMedicine, electronics, IT, and math all take longer than two years... Compare https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ (600-2200 class hours for B2 proficiency)
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- phendrenad2 6y agoHow do we know the cognitive impairment isn't causing people to not speak two languages (despite knowing two - as in they can't remember one of them), long before other symptoms appear? The only way to test that is to split a pool of bilingual people into two groups, and forbid one group from using one language. Was that done?
- jarvar 6y agoI image it has more to do with the fact that most people aren't exposed to two languages
- Agentlien 6y agoI saw a few comments here commenting this. It's a strange perspective to me. The people I know who are bilingual still prefer one language and use the other primarily to speak to people who don't know their primary language. As an example I am Swedish but fluent in English and Dutch. In my family we use a mix of Swedish and Dutch. But I use Swedish exclusively with anyone else who is Swedish unless someone is in the conversation who only knows English. I have both friends and colleagues who don't speak Swedish (nor Dutch) and I always speak Dutch with my wife's family. In this context it makes little sense that I'd simply stop using multiple languages, since then I'd be unable to speak to parts of my family, friends, and coworkers.
- phendrenad2 6y agoI guess someone might become fluent in a second language for work purposes, and then once retired, may not need to speak that language much.
- forgotmypw17 6y agohttps://archive.vn/DZJue https://archive.vn/DZJue
- dariosalvi78 6y agoWhat about 4 languages? I use English at work, Italian with my daughter, Spanish with my wife and Swedish on the street.
- 082349872349872 6y agoHej ragazzo, nice golaso! Four is up there with Charles V[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24513426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24513426 [1] who died at 58, due to poor diet and poor (in)breeding? In any case he shan't serve as a good dementia control.
- dariosalvi78 6y agoThat's actually who.my daughter sometimes speaks! :)
- b0rsuk 6y agoI read and write in English (comments mostly :-) all the time. Now I have a valid excuse to play team shooters regularly.
- 082349872349872 6y agoDo team shooters have discussion beyond simple imperatives? (I've learned a fair amount of spanish from sports, very little of which I could ever use in polite company. A few years ago I met someone's parents, and although I hear about mothers all the time on the pitch, it was memorable as the first time I'd been introduced to a real one.)
- tus88 6y agoWho gets the opportunity to do that if you are living in a native tongue land?
- augustk 6y agoMore or less anyone whose native tongue is not English.
- tus88 6y agoThen your not in your native tongue land. That was my point.
- 082349872349872 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diglossic_regions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diglossic_regions I wonder if actively used bureaucratese is far enough from Standard English to count as second lect? "In view of the somewhat nebulous and inexplicit nature of your remit, and the arguably marginal and peripheral nature of your influence within the central deliberations and decisions within the political process, there could be a case for restructuring their action priorities in such a way as to eliminate your liquidation from their immediate agenda." Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0j2dVuhr6s&t=60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0j2dVuhr6s&t=60
- ggrrhh_ta 6y agoThe methodology reminded me of Feynman's story about the "Young's 1937 rats study". The conclusions could have been better supported with simpler yet better methodology (given that, of course, from the nature of subject under study it can only reveal correlations, and could fail to detect unknown confounding factors). They could have actually gone to hundreds of elderly homes in Barcelona or, for that matter, better, in places where everyone is mostly actively bilingual (central/north Catalonia?) and regions where people are mostly monolinguals (Castille?) and requested anonymized data from medical records with that information (actively spoken languages vs. mental condition), or if that information was not available, to actually request it to be collected across all these centers, and then establish much stronger correlations. edit: I originally wrote "the methodology was unnecessarily weak for the conclusions", which was wrong to say from my side. We cannot always do what would be best but must do with what is available to us.
- mettamage 6y agoSimply my own thoughts, but I think any cognitive activity that is intensely practiced protects against cognitive impairment. My grandmother reads a lot of novels, including quite complicated ones and does a lot of language puzzles, yet only knows one language. I'm sure that if she would only watch television and not read a lot of (medieval-based) novels and language puzzles, then she will experience cognitive decline earlier in her life. I think the mantra "use it or lose it" is quite true in nature, in general.
- kriro 6y agoInterestingly, my mother started learning a foreign language recently and it got me thinking. Is anyone here well versed in the state of the art of brain plasticity? I always wondered if you could slow down Alzheimer's disease by trying to "outpace" the brain decline by forming new connections at a faster pace. Learning a language was the first thing that came to mind. I'd also be very interested in a comparison of two language vs. three language. Switzerland would be the obvious choice but children from partners that don't speak the same language and use English as a lingua franca or Canadians with one extra language (Chinese living in Canada etc.) should provide a big enough sample.
- tgv 6y agoThat study might be not support the wild conclusion in the title. They determined fluency in two languages (Spanish and Catalan) in people hospitalized in and around Barcelona. There are some hard-core Catalans that hardly --or even refuse to-- speak Spanish there, but not that many in Barcelona, but there are (many) people from other regions in Spain who are not fluent in Catalan, because they started working and living there a long time ago, when speaking Catalan simply was not needed, or perhaps still forbidden. These will be older, poorer and more frequently hospitalized. So they might simply be looking at two very different groups. Not a word about that in the abstract. I can't access the article. If actively speaking two languages has an influence, I wouldn't expect much of a difference between Spanish and Catalan: they are close enough to be seen as dialects. They should test this on e.g. English/Urdu speakers or Hungarian/Rumanian.
- known 6y agoDoes it prevent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome
- blackbrokkoli 6y agoThis is pseudo-science. Please refrain from upvoting. You cannot prove (or imply) causation via observation. The only method we know to find causation is by setting up an experiment. This study however merely measures variables in a pre-existing context, without injecting independent variables. The only valid result you may extract from this is a correlation, never causation. Please edit the title to reflect correlation or (IMO preferred) delete the submission, because such bad science surely does not pass the quality barrier of HN.
- threatofrain 6y agoProtection is a term of art and doesn't deduce causality... > This is pseudo-science. Please refrain from upvoting. You cannot prove (or imply) causation via observation. The only method we know to find causation is by setting up an experiment. This study however merely measures variables in a pre-existing context, without injecting independent variables. The only valid result you may extract from this is a correlation, never causation. > Please edit the title to reflect correlation or (IMO preferred) delete the submission, because such bad science surely does not pass the quality barrier of HN. Hmm...
- blackbrokkoli 6y agoCan you elaborate? If I say "vegetables save you from cancer" that implies a causation, wouldn't you agree? Just because it does not explicitly say "cause" it still very clearly says "if you do X, Y will happen". Why do you think this is not applicable?
- threatofrain 6y agoIt means that when the term is used professionally in literature, it doesn't mean to suggest a deduction of causality. Also, causal deduction is not the only way to arrive at a competent causal theory; humans and animals do it all the time, and they do it to such proficiency that it cannot be explained by a methodical process of causal deduction.
- thesz 6y agoI keep saying that brain grows (BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor is released into blood) when body encounter evolutionary familiar stress - hunger, need for endurance and need for force exertion. Basically, brain was made for body to experience less of that stress. As an example of what BDNF does: endurance exercise is known for elevating serum BDNF levels long-term [1] and endurance exercise has been shown to help with Parkinsons' [2]. Thus, can it be that these speaking two languages experience more of that stresses thorough their life? The article does not suggest that these factors were, well, factored out. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6613032/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6613032/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28870627/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28870627/ PS https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260394068_Long_term_habitual_exercise_is_associated_with_lower_resting_level_of_serum_BDNF https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260394068_Long_term... - they suggest that habitual exercise does not produce more BDNF or it is not BDNF that acts on the brain, I counter that body utilizes it better, just like glucose in blood.
- hakeberio 6y agoLearning a new language is often accompanied by the very real feeling of your "mind expanding." I think that's because being able to understand/speak another language is almost like experiencing a whole new world; another rich set of culture, people, literature, etc different from yours suddenly become very much accessible. The Wittgenstein adage > The limits of my language mean the limits of my world rings true for me.