Multilingualism protects against accelerated aging in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of 27 European countries.

Lucia Amoruso, Hernan Hernandez, Hernando Santamaria-Garcia, Sebastian Moguilner, Agustina Legaz, Pavel Prado, Jhosmary Cuadros, Liset Gonzalez, Raul Gonzalez-Gomez, Joaquín Migeot, Carlos Coronel-Oliveros, Josephine Cruzat, Manuel Carreiras, Vicente Medel, Marcelo Adrián Maito, Claudia Duran-Aniotz, Enzo Tagliazucchi, Sandra Baez, Adolfo M García, Agustin Ibanez

Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), San Sebastian, Spain.Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), San Sebastian, Spain. · pubmed

Paper

Abstract

Aging trajectories are influenced by modifiable risk factors, and prior evidence has hinted that multilingualism may have protective potential. However, reliance on suboptimal health markers, small samples, inadequate confounder control and a focus on clinical cohorts led to mixed findings and limited applicability to healthy populations. Here, we developed biobehavioral age gaps, quantifying delayed or accelerated aging in 86,149 participants across 27 European countries. National surveys provided individual-level positive (functional ability, education, cognition) and adverse (cardiometabolic conditions, female sex, sensory impairments) factors, while country-level multilingualism served as an aggregate exposure. Biobehavioral factors predicted age (R

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Research summary

Multilingualism is associated with delayed aging as measured by biobehavioral age gaps across a large sample. The study investigates a modifiable factor (multilingualism) that may influence aging trajectories, which aligns with the goal of understanding and potentially mitigating the root causes of aging.

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