NPR's Joe Palca reports that a long-tern study of nuns suggests that a person's linguistic abilities when they are young may predict their risk for Alzheimer's disease. Researchers at the University of Kentucky analyzed the linguistic abilities of a group of nuns when they were in their 20s. An average of 58 years later, the researchers tested the nuns' cognitive abilities. In this week's Journal of the American Medical Association, the researchers report that the nuns with the lowest scores on the linguistic analysis had the lowest scores on their cognitive functions five decades later.
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