Midlife use of written Japanese and protection from late life dementia.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The cognitive reserve hypothesis would predict that use of written Japanese should confer protection against dementia because of the complexity of its ideograms compared with written English. We sought to test this hypothesis in analyses from a longitudinal study of Japanese-American men.

Methods

Participants were second-generation Japanese-American men (Nisei) on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, who were seen in 1965 and in subsequent examinations to detect dementia beginning in 1991-1993. Use of spoken and written Japanese was self-reported in 1965 (Analyses 1 and 2), and midlife use of written Japanese and written English was self-reported in 1994-1996 (Analysis 3). We analyzed prevalent dementia outcomes in 1991-1993 (Analysis 1, n = 3139) using logistic regression

SUBMITTER: Crane PK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3044600 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature