The Language of Brain Health

With Researcher Noelia Calvo.

It was an inspirational presentation at a conference that gave Noelia Calvo an idea for the next chapter in her research career. The speaker was Dr. Gillian Einstein, leader of the Einstein Lab at the University of Toronto, who talked about sex, gender, and aging. For Ms. Calvo, who was doing a post-doc at York University in Toronto focusing on multilingualism as a resilience proxy for dementia, it struck a chord.

“I was just amazed by the research, and it led naturally to me joining the lab,” Ms. Calvo said in an interview with Mind Over Matter®.

A native of Argentina, she had personal exposure to dementia through caring for her grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s disease. But she already had an interest in neurodegenerative conditions, particularly the areas in the brain that deal with language.

Now as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychology, Ms. Calvo has expanded into studies of the impact of hormones on cognition, drawing upon the lab’s substantial work with women who have had their ovaries removed through a procedure called a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO).

She has studied risk and resilience in this cohort (with 333 participants) at the Einstein Lab, a cohort supported by CCNA (COMPASS_ND), and a larger British cohort called the UK Biobank cohort (with more than 34,000 participants).

I was interested in big data analysis because it was an opportunity to analyze different risk and resilience factors that may affect women at different stages in their life.

A BSO has the effect of inducing menopause in women years earlier than normal. Ms. Calvo compared this group with women who went into menopause spontaneously at the average age of 51 years.

In summarizing her results to date, she writes that the differences are profound:

“My findings indicate that surgical menopause, which happens on average ten years younger than natural menopause, may be a risk for worse neuropsychological performance on memory tasks, may lead to a two-fold increase in the odds of Subjective Cognitive Decline, a fourfold increase in the odds of Alzheimer’s disease, and decreases in grey matter volumes in brain regions sensitive to estradiol (an ovarian hormone) and important for mood, memory, and language.”

She found several factors that could boost resilience and mitigate the risks of dementia, including estradiol therapy, higher education, and higher verbal IQ.

Her work contributes to our understanding of a central element of dementia research. “It helps to try to find some clarity on the question of why more women than men have Alzheimer’s disease.”

Ms. Calvo said that she has also learned a great deal about caregivers, something that resonated with her, given her experience with her grandmother. “Alzheimer’s affects not only the patient but the families of the patient. Studies show that caregivers have a higher risk for depression and anxiety, which themselves raise a risk for Alzheimer’s disease. I don’t think it’s been researched very much.”

Next, she is interested in studying health equity, an issue with much resonance in a multicultural, multilingual urban area such as Toronto. She has already gathered evidence on health inequities related to language, biological sex, and social factors by working with people who come from various parts of the world and speak different languages, and she wants to explore social determinants of health and their impact on risk and resilience for dementia.

“Black Americans and Latinos, for example, have a higher risk for dementia than the rest of the population in the United States, so it will be interesting to see if that also occurs here in Canada. Immigration is a big factor, but views on immigration and settling immigrants are very different here in Canada than the United States.”

Ms. Calvo said that joining the Einstein Lab has broadened her perspective. “It’s allowed me to participate more in different parts and different stages of research that I wasn’t able to participate in before. In general, every day is a learning opportunity.”

Source: Mind Over Matter V21