Bilingualism may delay onset of dementia

Toronto -- The lifelong use of more than one language may delay the onset of dementia by several years, according to a Canadian study.

The Aerzte Zeitung newspaper published in the German town of Neu-Isenburg said that the greater number of brain-cell connections was the likely reason.

Ellen Bialystok, a neuro-psychologist at York University in Toronto, studied 230 people with cognitive disorders, 184 of them suffering from dementia.

The first symptoms of dementia in monolingual people appeared on average at the age of 71. In bilingual people, however, the mean age was 75.5 years.