Poorer clinical outcomes for older adult monolinguals when matched to bilinguals on brain health

Previous studies have reported bilingualism to be a proxy of cognitive reserve (CR) based on evidence that bilinguals express dementia symptoms ~ 4 years later than monolinguals yet present with greater neuropathology at time of diagnosis when clinical levels are similar. The current study provides new evidence supporting bilingualism’s contribution to CR using a novel brain health matching paradigm. Forty cognitively normal bilinguals with diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance images recruited from the community were matched with monolinguals drawn from a pool of 165 individuals in the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. White matter integrity was determined for all participants using fractional anisotropy, axial diffusivity, and radial diffusivity scores. Propensity scores were obtained using white matter measures, sex, age, and education as predictive covariates, and then used in one-to-one matching between language groups, creating a matched sample of 32 participants per group. Matched monolinguals had poorer clinical diagnoses than that predicted by chance from a theoretical null distribution, and poorer cognitive performances than matched bilinguals as measured by scores on the MMSE. The findings provide support for the interpretation that bilingualism acts as a proxy of CR such that monolinguals have poorer clinical and cognitive outcomes than bilinguals for similar levels of white matter integrity even before clinical symptoms appear.