title: Biology enters the scene-a new perspective on bilingualism, cognition, and dementia.
abstract: The question of whether bilingualism can influence cognitive functions in healthy aging as well as in brain diseases is currently a topic of an intense debate. In a study published in this issue of the "Neurobiology of Ageing", Estanga et al. are breaking new ground by combining cognitive and biological approaches. Based on the data from the Guipuzkoa Alzheimer Project, they report that, compared with monolinguals, early bilinguals are not only characterized by a better cognitive performance in several domains and a lower prevalence of Alzheimer's disease but also by lower levels of t-tau in their cerebrospinal fluid. We suggest that sustained activation of noradrenergic signaling pathways associated with bilingualism could provide a possible mechanism linking results of this study with previous observations of delayed onset of dementia in bilinguals.
authors.affiliation: University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland; UK Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Electronic address: thomas.bak@ed.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Thomas H
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Bak
authors.affiliation: Trinity College, Dublin.
authors.forename: Ian
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Robertson
mesh_terms: D059331:Adrenergic Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D017668:Age of Onset; D000375:Aging / Q000134:cerebrospinal fluid / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology*; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000209:etiology; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D019303:Multilingualism; D015398:Signal Transduction / Q000502:physiology; D016875:tau Proteins / Q000134:cerebrospinal fluid
chemical_list: D016875:tau Proteins
keywords: Alzheimer disease; Bilingualism; Cognitive reserve; Noradrenergic pathways