Busy doing crosswords to avoid Alzheimer's? You'd be better off going to university, according to new research.
The more education - and the more demanding a job – you have, the better protected you might be against the memory loss that precedes the disease.
Researchers at San Raffaele University in Milan studied 242 people with Alzheimer's disease, 72 people with mild cognitive impairment, and 144 people with no memory problems for just over a year.
They tested their memory and cognitive skills and used brain scans to measure how far Alzheimer's disease had affected their brains. During the 14-month study, 21 of the people with mild cognitive impairment developed Alzheimer's disease.
They found that more educated people with mentally demanding jobs had significantly more damaged brains from Alzheimer's disease than people with less education and less mentally demanding jobs - which suggests that more education and demanding jobs create a "buffer" against the effects of dementia on the brain.
If you've got a university education, your brain should be able to compensate for the damage and allow you to maintain functioning in spite of it – either because the brain becomes stronger through education and occupational challenges, or because of the genetic factors that enabled people to achieve higher education and occupational achievement in the first place, the researchers said. Even if the number of "senior moments" highly educated vice-chancellors seem to have might suggest otherwise.
Never mind the potential for earning more if you go to university, watch ministers start using the slogan "avoid Alzheimer's" to persuade youngsters of the benefits of higher education.
