Strokes, strokes, and strokes are one of the biggest health threats. According to the Spanish Society of Neurology, 650,000 people a year die from these causes in Europe –40,000 are Spanish– and some 120,000 new cases are detected. Every six minutes a stroke occurs in our country.
In addition, sequelae must be considered, including those that affect the cognitive ability of patients. Now, a study published in Stroke , the journal of the American Heart Association, announces that those who speak two or more languages recover better in that aspect than those who speak only one.
The research, conducted mostly by scientists from the Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS), located in Hyderabad, India, has analyzed the cases of 608 patients who had suffered a stroke in the period between 2006 and 2013. More half of these people spoke two or more languages. To ensure that lifestyle did not influence the results, the specialists took into account other factors such as age, diabetes, tobacco use or high blood pressure.
Conclusions? Around 40% of those affected who were fluent in two or more languages maintained normal cognitive functions after suffering a stroke, a percentage that dropped to 20% among monolinguals. They also performed better on tests that measured attention span, and the ability to remember and organize information. However, there was no difference between them in the possibility of suffering from aphasia, a common disorder in these patients, characterized by difficulties in speaking, reading and writing.
According to Suvarna Alladi, study director and professor of neurology at NIMS, “The advantage of bilingualism is that it enables people to jump between languages: they inhibit one language and activate the other.” That makes finding specific words more complex, and that extra work could result in a more “trained” brain to recover after a problem.
However, these scientists admit that more research is needed to find out if their study is applicable to all bilingual people in the world. Hyderabad is a multicultural city where many languages are spoken: Indian, Telugi, Urdu, English… As Alladi says , “The continuous change from one language to another is the daily reality of many Hyderabadians . The cognitive benefit that this entails might not exist in places where this is not the case ”.
In any case, as stated by Thomas Bak, study co-author and cognitive neurologist at the University of Edinburgh, “our work suggests that sustained intellectually stimulating activities can protect you from the damage caused by a stroke .”
