Researchers have found adult education reduces the risk of fluid intelligence and visuospatial memory by 19 per cent for middle-aged and elderly people within five years.
The findings were published in Frontiers in Ageing Neuroscience by researchers from Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan’s Institute of Development, Ageing, and Cancer.
“Here we show that people who take adult education classes have a lower risk of developing dementia five years later,” said Dr Hikaru Takeuchi, the study’s first author.
“Adult education is likewise associated with better preservation of nonverbal reasoning with increasing age.”
Dr Ryuta Kawashima, a professor at the same institution and Takeuchi’s co-author, examined information from the UK Biobank, which has the genetic, health, and medical details of almost 500,000 British volunteers, of whom 282,421 individuals were examined for this study.
