Word: snowdons
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Applying these measures to the sisters' autobiographies, Snowdon and Kemper found to their astonishment that the elderly sisters who showed signs of Alzheimer's had consistently authored essays low in both idea density and grammatical complexity a half-century or more earlier. One of the lowest-scoring samples begins: "My father, Mr. L.M. Hallacher, was born in the city of Ross, County Cork, Ireland, and is now a sheet-metal worker in Eau Claire." By contrast, one of the highest-scoring essays conveys the same type of information but in a dramatically different way: "My father is an all-around...
Idea density turns out to be an astonishingly powerful predictor of Alzheimer's disease--at least among the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Snowdon found by reading nuns' early writings, he could predict, with 85% to 90% accuracy, which ones would show the brain damage typical of Alzheimer's disease about 60 years later. "When we first looked at the findings," says Snowdon, "we thought, 'Oh my God, it's in the bag by the time you're in your...
...simple. One especially telling case: Sister Bernadette (not her real name), who had shown no outward signs of Alzheimer's and whose youthful autobiography was rich with ideas and grammatical complexity, turned out at death to be riddled with the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer's (see diagram). Says Snowdon: "Lesson No. 1 in my epidemiology training is that there are hardly any diseases where one factor alone, even in infectious disease, will always cause illness...
...taught for most of their lives showed more moderate declines than those who had spent most of their lives in service-based tasks. And that, says Kemper, supports the commonsense idea that stimulating the brain with continuous intellectual activity keeps neurons healthy and alive. (Of course, notes Snowdon, these activities are not absolute protectors. For some, a genetic predisposition may override even a lifetime of learning and teaching...
Another crucial finding from the Nun Study came in 1997, by which time Snowdon had accumulated some 100 brains for analysis. He and neurologist Dr. William Markesbery, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the University of Kentucky, were intrigued by an idea advanced by other researchers that strokes and other brain trauma might contribute to the dementia of Alzheimer's disease. Selecting only the brains of sisters who had earned a bachelor's degree--to eliminate any differences attributable to education--they found that among nuns with physical evidence of Alzheimer's in the brain, those...