Jun 12, 2007
Learning and the Battle Against Alzheimer's Disease
The early years are all about learning. Babies’ and toddlers’ brains are in overdrive as they learn to interpret and interact with the world around them.
When they begin attending school, children spend many hours each day learning brain-taxing skills such as math, reading, and writing.
Adolescence and early adulthood require enormous amounts of learning as well, both in school and out. People in this age group learn how to forge deeper personal relationships — no easy task. Also, many young adults enter the workforce, requiring that they learn new job skills as well as life skills for self sufficiency.
For many of us, the amount of learning in our lives drops dramatically once we have established careers and families. Learning is replaced with routine. The demands of work and family limit the amount of time we have to immerse ourselves into learning new skills or subjects. After a long day juggling work and family obligations, most of us choose to veg out on the couch watching TV over studying a foreign language or tackling calculus.
By the time we retire from a lifetime of work, we’re beat. We’ve worked hard, paid off the mortgage, and feel we’ve earned the luxury of sitting back and relaxing. Motivation to tackle something hard is at an all-time low.
But, according to many research studies, just about the worst thing we can do later in life is take it easy physically and intellectually.
According to the Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures 2007, 13 percent of people 65 years of age and older currently have Alzheimer’s disease. In the over 85 age group, nearly 50 percent have this terrible disease.
It’s easy to attribute the prevalence in Alzheimer’s to an aging population and greater longevity. Strangely, though, the rates of other age-related diseases are dropping. Between the years 2000 and 2004:
- Deaths from heart disease dropped by 8 percent
- Deaths from breast cancer dropped by 2.6 percent
- Deaths from prostate cancer dropped by 6.3 percent
- Deaths from stroke dropped by 10.4 percent
In comparison, over the same time period, deaths from Alzheimer’s disease rose by a staggering 32.8 percent.
An increasing amount of research suggests that learning reduces the risk and rate of progression of Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, a number of studies have found an association between Alzheimer’s disease and limited education experience.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association:
“The data suggest that increased educational and occupational attainment may reduce the risk of incident AD [Alzheimer's Disease], either by decreasing ease of clinical detection of AD or by imparting a reserve that delays the onset of clinical manifestations.”
If information such as this doesn’t create a population of life-long learners, I don’t know what will.
