Dementia risk significantly reduced by one key lifestyle change, experts find
Enrolling in adult education classes could potentially lower the risk of dementia, researchers have said in a groundbreaking revelation. A new study indicates that middle-aged and senior citizens who take part in adult education are 19% less likely to develop the condition within five years.
The research also suggests that those who attended these classes maintained their fluid intelligence - the capacity for quick reasoning and abstract thinking - and non-verbal reasoning performance more effectively than their counterparts who did not.
Dr Hikaru Takeuchi, the lead author from Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, stated: "Here we show that people who take adult education classes have a lower risk of developing dementia five years later. Adult education is likewise associated with better preservation of non-verbal reasoning with increasing age."
Dr Takeuchi, along with his co-author Dr Ryuta Kawashima, a professor at the Institute of Development, Ageing and Cancer at the university, scrutinised data from 282,421 individuals in the UK Biobank. The Biobank holds genetic, health, and medical information from approximately half a million British volunteers.
These participants had enrolled between 2006 and 2010, when they were aged between 40 and 69, and had been monitored for an average of seven years at the time of this study.
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In a groundbreaking study, individuals were assigned a predictive risk score for dementia based on their DNA and were asked to report if they had participated in any adult education classes, without providing details about the frequency, subject, or academic level of these classes.
The research, conducted between 2014 and 2018, analysed data from both the enrolment visit and the third assessment visit. Participants underwent psychological and cognitive tests, assessing areas such as fluid intelligence, visuospatial memory, and reaction time.
According to the study, which was published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 1.1% of the sample population developed dementia over the course of the research period. It was found that those who were engaged in adult education at the time of enrolment had a 19% lower risk of developing dementia compared to those who did not participate in such activities.
These results remained consistent even when individuals with a history of diabetes, high cholesterol, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, or mental illness were excluded from the analysis. This suggests that the observed lower risk is not solely due to people with developing dementia being prevented from pursuing adult education due to symptoms of these known conditions.
Dr Kawashima, one of the researchers, said: "One possibility is that engaging in intellectual activities has positive results on the nervous system, which in turn may prevent dementia. But ours is an observational longitudinal study, so if a direct causal relationship exists between adult education and a lower risk of dementia, it could be in either direction."
* This article was crafted with the help of an AI tool, which speeds up The Mirror's editorial research. An editor reviewed this content before it was published. You can report any errors to [email protected]
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