Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Bilingualism, Cognition, and Brain Health in Aging: Population-Scale Investigations in the NIH All of Us Research Program Cohort
Poster Session B, Friday, September 12, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Srishti Nayak1; 1Vanderbilt University Medical Center
INTRODUCTION. There has been a high level of popular and scientific interest in the idea of bilingual “benefits” or “advantages” in cognition. Current theories posit that bilinguals’ day-to-day language control, shifting, planning, perception, and production experiences rely heavily on domain-general executive function networks in the brain, providing a kind of regular cognitive exercise. Cumulative bilingual life experiences are thought to result in a “cognitive reserve” that delays onsets and improves outcomes for aging-related neurodegeneration and cognitive decline. In parallel, extensive research on dementia has identified a host of modifiable risk factors for cognitive decline and dementia across early, midlife, and later life (e.g. social isolation, hearing impairment). Given the evidence from behavioral, clinical, and neuroscience studies (albeit in modest samples), could monolingualism be a potentially modifiable risk factor for neurodegeneration in aging? In behavioral studies, healthy bilinguals often show greater EF test performance in older adulthood; and bilingual adults show differential brain structure, function, brain chemistry, and resting state activity (compared to monolinguals). While it is commonly acknowledged that low English proficiency is a social determinant of health, bilingual experiences in high English proficiency contexts are underexplored in the context of large-scale population health approaches. With over 15.5% of individuals in the US above 65 years old now identifying as bilinguals who are highly proficient in English (2022 American Community Survey), we need a clearer understanding of the biologically-driven effects language background can have on health in the population. This effort will require large-scale and well-powered data that can account for individual differences in multiple ways. APPROACH. This project tests the central idea that bilingualism is a biologically-relevant life experience that could positively impact brain health in aging. We will conduct a well-powered study of associations (logistic regressions) between being bilingual – with low or high English proficiency – and clinical markers of brain health in aging (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, mild cognitive impairment). Further, we will examine associations (logistic regressions) between being bilingual, and measures of cognition (e.g., attention and executive function) available in All of Us including a version of the Flanker Task; gradual onset continuous performance task (GradCPT); and delay discounting task. Due to very large sample sizes afforded by the All of Us study (N > 100,000 with language background and EHR data; N > 30,000 have cognitive measures available), we will be able to rigorously control for multiple known modifiable risk factors of interest for neurodegeneration and dementias (e.g. smoking, physical activity levels, BMI, hearing impairment, and more: Livingston et al., 2024), with sufficient statistical power. Preliminary analyses show that N ~ 15,000 of those asked about their language background are bilingual. SIGNIFICANCE. The majority of scientific and clinical research on cognition, brain health, and aging, currently does not account for bilingual life experiences as clinically or biologically relevant. All of Us data presents a massive opportunity to investigate the impact of bilingualism on brain health outcomes at population scales, integrating methods from the cognitive neuroscience of language, epidemiology, and biomedical informatics methods.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Computational Approaches