Posted on 01/25/2025 8:15:26 PM PST by bimboeruption
Dementia claims the lives of smarter people sooner, scientists have discovered.
People who spend more years at school or in education are likely to deteriorate from the neurodegenerative disease faster, according to the biggest study of its kind.
Scientists have dubbed the phenomenon the “cognitive reserve paradigm”. Authors from the Erasmus University Medical Centre, in Rotterdam, Netherlands, said: “This paradigm postulates that people with higher education are more resilient to brain injury before functional declines.
“Once this reserve has been used up and dementia is diagnosed, however, these people are already at a more advanced stage of the underlying disease and clinical progression will be faster.”
Dementia is the leading cause of death in the UK and there are various types with differing symptoms, impact and rates of decline.
The condition is caused by certain proteins clumping together in the brain, including amyloid and tau, which new drugs are trying to stop from occurring.
A person’s cognitive reserve is their brain’s ability to cope and keep working, including in the face of diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s.
It can be bolstered through learning and mental stimulation such as education and doing brain puzzles.
But the research found that, paradoxically, these patients go downhill faster if they do get a diagnosis.
Research published in the BMJ, which analysed 261 studies including 36 relating to educational attainment, found life expectancy after a dementia diagnosis decreased for every extra year of education a person had received.
The average survival time was 10.5 years, but the scientists calculated that for every extra year of study a person had undertaken, they lived for 0.2 years less – equivalent to about two and a half months.
It would mean someone who had finished an undergraduate degree aged 21 would live for a year less than...
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Lol!
Just like smart people were always more likely to have bad trips
This “study” makes an assumption so stupid that if the study’s conclusion is correct, its authors should be completely safe from dementia. It just assumes that “education” is automatically something that makes people smarter. But the reality is that “education” is just a word, and many people receiving an “education” are actually receiving nothing more than harmful political indoctrination that makes them dumber and less able to reason intelligently. So undefined “education” can’t have the homogenous effect they claim.
Thank you, lol! Well there goes my theory. Totally forgot to try right-clicking. Maybe I was just smart enough at one point (back in the mists of time, and it certainly wasn’t in math!) to be in dementia danger now. Ahhh, such is life.
Sometimes things just don’t load properly on the first try
Happens to all of us at one point or another! :)
More-educated people decline faster once they are finally diagnosed.
But they are diagnosed later than uneducated people. (Their higher educational level helped stave off the onset of the disease.)
This is analogous to determining that runners who die during the final minutes of marathons tend to be healthier and more fit overall than runners who die during the first minutes of marathons.
The findings of this study are thoroughly felicitous and should be welcomed by people with high educational attainments.
Regards,
Anybody that has a mother that was 38 years or older when they were born, is very much at risk...
Very intelligent people tend to be that way.
I completely understand TheWriterTX's predicament and can empathize. When you've lived most of your life being able to speed-read "War and Peace" in the original Russian, while simultaneously solving the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle on the fly, suddenly having to occasionally struggle to recall, e.g., a line of poetry by some obscure, second-rate Roman poet can be worrisome.
Regards,
The probands in this study were probably for the most part older people who got their degrees in the 1970s or earlier - i.e., before higher education went completely to the dogs.
Regards,
How does this affect the younger generation that spends excessive amounts of time in higher educational institutions and become dumber?
bkmk
I had a friend who got Dementia in his 40’s. The facility gave him Sudoku books to pacify him.
I find this difficult to believe. It’s like saying Biden was an Albert Einstein.
Or
It’s totally impossible for Harris to get dementia.
Dementia claims the lives of smarter people sooner, scientists have discovered.”
Actually what this article is saying is that people with advanced degrees are diagnosed LATER IN THE DISEASE PROCESS. Therefore they die sooner AFTER DIANOSIS.
The article is totally misleading garbage.
Can we give them some taxpayer funded drugs so they can earn enough to pay their taxpayer provided student loans before they are too demented to work and then the taxpayers have to eat their losses?
Yet another meta analysis crapola dressed as ‘study’.
The re$ult of mo$t $tudie$: More $tudie$ needed.
I don’t disagree that there are a lot of educated idiots out there. My husband graduated from a trade school and is a brilliant man in ways that I am not.
In the past, I could have a phone call with a prospective client and remember everything about them even days later. Now, I have to refer to my notes within an hour. If I don’t write it down, it’s gone.
I was also very good at multitasking. Now, I have to focus on one thing at a time or it’s gone.
I’m utilizing coping mechanisms to get by; this was never required before.
My immediate family is noticing the difference. My husband is brushing it off as us both getting older, but I know it’s something more. Testing confirmed there are dead spots on my brain that did not exist pre-COVID.
It’s disheartening, to say the least.
You are correct, Alex. I never read War and Peace in the original Russian, but I was able to sketch out a build for a new nightstand for my daughter and write my annual business plan while simultaneously feeding my kids on a long road trip.
I could not do that today. My mind would get lost.
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