In his recent book How To Prevent Dementia, Dr. Restak ― author, clinical professor of neurology at George Washington University, and former President of the American Neuropsychiatric Association ― revealed that risk factors for dementia might be noticeable much earlier than we thought.
“Experiencing the onset of dementia isn’t like falling down a flight of stairs: unpredictable, sudden, and with maximal damage in close approximation to the inciting cause,” he said.
Instead, the disease can be “gradual”, as he says: “It’s more like a slow walk in a swimming pool, starting from the shallow end and moving towards the deep end.”
A study that revealed how early we might be able to spot signs of dementia, he said, was a 1968 study run by epidemiologist David Snowdon. This is commonly known as “the nun study” as it involved 678 nuns.
One of the things Snowdon found in this study, Dr. Restak says, is that how nuns described their prior jobs and lives in their autobiographical essay applications to join convents ― often written when they were in their twenties ― somewhat predicted instances of dementia once the nuns got older.
What? How?
Snowdon found that nuns who would later get dementia expressed fewer ideas in their sentences when younger than those who did not, Dr. Restak explained.
“The best functioning nuns differed from their counterparts who had succumbed to dementia by what he termed cognitive density: many thoughts and ideas woven into few sentences and paragraphs,” he revealed.
For instance, one 93-year-old nun had written seventy years before, “After I finished the eighth grade in 1921, I desired to become an aspirant at Mankato [a convent], but I myself did not have the courage to ask permission of my parents. So Sister Egreda did in my stead.”
This nun had “just finished writing a biography and engaged regularly in knitting, crocheting, card playing, and daily walking” at the time of interview, Dr. Restake added.
Meanwhile, another nun ― who, also in her 90s, was showing signs of dementia ― “wrote in her early twenties, ‘After I left school, I worked in the post office.’”
“The first nun presents her vocation as marked by complexity, ambivalence, and perhaps even some unwillingness. She could not bring herself to mention her vocational wishes to her parents,” Dr. Restak points out.
“The second nun, in contrast, leads with only a plain sentence concerning where she worked before entering the convent.“
Of course, the way you describe your job isn’t the only way this can show up: it’s all about that cognitive density we talked about earlier, or how many thoughts you pack into your words.
And bear in mind that this phenomenon was observed among nuns who were writing their essays in their twenties. “The Nun Study adds an additional reason to believe that Alzheimer’s disease starts many years before it’s first identified by physicians and family,” Dr. Restak says.