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24 April 2006
Make Friends, Avoid Alzheimer’s 
Physicians from the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago say that having a robust social network and maintaining regular contact with family members offers a protective effect against the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's disease. Their study, published in The Lancet Neurology, is the first to specifically examine the relationship between social networks and Alzheimer's disease pathology. The participants in the study detailed their networks of friends and acquaintances and underwent clinical evaluations and cognitive performance tests over a number of years. The researchers found that the relationship between the amount of Alzheimer's disease pathology and cognitive performance changed with the size of the social network. Specifically, as the size of the social network increased, the same amount of pathology had less effect on cognitive test scores. In other words, for persons without much pathology, social network size had little effect on cognition. However, as the amount of pathology increased, the apparent protective effect on cognition also increased. This, the researchers believe, indicates that a large social network appears to offer a protective effect, despite the fact that the participants' brains had indicators of Alzheimer's disease. The beneficial effects were evident across different kinds of cognitive abilities, but were most evident for semantic memory, which is the repository of knowledge about the world and is fundamentally involved in unique human cognitive processes such as language. "Many elderly people who have the tangles and plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease don't clinically experience cognitive impairment or dementia," said researcher David A. Bennett. "Our findings suggest that social networks are related to something that offers a 'protective reserve' capacity that spares them the clinical manifestations of Alzheimer's disease. Previous studies suggest one factor is education. Now we know that healthy and frequent interactions with friends and family have a positive impact as well." Source: Rush University Medical Center
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