Research progress on bilingualism and Alzheimer's disease / 中华老年医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Alzheimer's disease(AD)is the most common type of dementia.It is of great significance to systematically explore the interaction between bilingualism and AD for patients' cognitive rehabilitation and reduction of the burden on patients' families and society.Based on our literature review, bilingualism may be a beneficial factor for cognitive reserve helping to delay the onset of AD and thus exert positive effects mitigating the decline in patients' cognitive ability such as memory, executive control and visuospatial function.In turn, AD can impair patients' bilingual ability to varying degrees.In future research, more efforts should be directed toward elucidating the influence of bilingual characteristics, the age of second language acquisition, second language proficiency and other factors on AD as well as the influence of AD on patients' attention, emotional cognition and social cognition.