Deans' stroke musings: Kids' School Grades Tied to Late-Life Dementia Risk

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Kids' School Grades Tied to Late-Life Dementia Risk

So were you above the bottom quintile when you were 10? I know I was above that. And I did have data complex jobs my whole life. So maybe your doctor is off the hook in having protocols to prevent dementia.

Kids' School Grades Tied to Late-Life Dementia Risk

Study suggests cognitive reserve is established in childhood.

School performance at age 10 was a dominant risk factor for later diagnosis of dementia in a long-running Swedish study, which subsequent education and high-complexity jobs in adulthood could not fully overcome, a researcher said here.

Using data from a cohort study that ran for more than 90 years, Serhiy Dekhtyar, PhD, and colleagues from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, found that participants with low grades at age 10 were at 21% higher risk for an eventual dementia diagnosis (P<0.05).
Although, as in previous studies, educational attainment and "data-complex" employment reduced the risk of late-life dementia, school grades at age 10 remained a significant predictive factor for eventual dementia even when these other factors were accounted for, according to data Dekhtyar presented at an Alzheimer's Association International Conference press briefing.
"It seems education and occupational complexity could not compensate for the effect of low baseline abilities -- risk was similar in subjects with low grades irrespective of occupation or education," Dekhtyar said.
He and colleagues drew on data from the Uppsala Birth Cohort study, which enrolled 7,574 newborns from 1915 to 1929 and then followed them through 2008.
School performance was based on grades in seven subjects at age 10, obtained from school records, combined into a grade point average. The cohort was divided into quintiles based on these averages. "Low" grades were defined as the bottom quintile and the statistical analyses compared this group against the other four quintiles combined.
Data on education and job types were taken from national census data, and follow-up for dementia diagnosis (from health registries) began when participants reached age 65. Mean follow-up from this point was 21 years, and the analyses were adjusted for socioeconomic status at birth.
When school grades were left out of the analysis, Dekhtyar and colleagues found that having employment in midlife that involved expertise with numbers appeared to be modestly protective against dementia, with a hazard ratio of 0.77 (P<0.05) versus other job types.
A similar association was seen for individuals with university degrees or professional education (HR 0.74, P<0.05).
But the strongest association was for participants who were in the top four quintiles of school grades plus higher education and data-complex jobs, with an HR 0.61 for dementia (P<0.0001).
Dekhtyar told MedPage Today that there did not seem to be a special benefit to being in the top quintile of age-10 school grades compared to those in the middle. "What really punishes you is to be at the bottom," he said.
Press briefing moderator Suzanne Craft, PhD, of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., commented that researchers are beginning to appreciate that cognitive reserve -- the cushion against clinical effects of damaging brain pathologies that is strongly associated with education and regular mental activity -- is established early.
Craft said the study demonstrates "the importance of education early in life -- making sure our children have access to high quality cognitive stimulation and education," and that "the stage is set for Alzheimer's years and years before it appears."
Dekhtyar told MedPage Today that it would be intriguing to examine even earlier factors that could influence cognitive reserve. A controversial one is head circumference at birth, he said; data on this are available in the Uppsala cohort and they appear to correlate with school grades.
A previous study in adults found that brain size was associated with better cognitive ability in people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease; another found that skull size (a measure of maximal brain size achieved in young adulthood) correlated with cognition and physical function in multiple sclerosis patients.