A new study has revealed that certain mental abilities in adolescence may be linked to a reduced risk of developing dementia in later life.
The study was based on data from 10,539 Swedish participants born in 1948. In 1961, the participants underwent tests to measure inductive reasoning, verbal and spatial abilities.
Inductive reasoning measures a person's ability to discover patterns and deduce rules from a set of information. The tests participants underwent included tasks such as completing numerical sequences, identifying patterns, and selecting items that did not belong to a given set.
The researchers followed the participants until November 2025, during which time 287 people developed dementia, representing 2.7% of the study population. They found that participants who scored higher on inductive reasoning tests at age 13 were 16% less likely to develop dementia.
The results showed that each additional point on the inductive reasoning test was associated with a 2% lower risk of developing dementia, while tests measuring verbal and spatial abilities did not show a similar association.
The researchers also considered other factors that could influence the risk of dementia, including the participants' and their parents' education levels, as well as certain chronic illnesses. They then replicated the results using another group of approximately 20,000 people born in 1953 and found a similar correlation: those with the highest inductive reasoning scores had a 15% lower risk of developing dementia.
Researchers believe that one possible explanation for these findings may be related to the frontoparietal network in the brain, which plays a role in working memory, planning and decision-making, and whose declining performance is associated with cognitive decline.
The researchers also introduced the concept of "system integrity," which posits that people with better cognitive function in early life may also have better health in a number of vital systems, including the brain, heart, and metabolic processes.
However, the study does not prove that higher inductive reasoning abilities in adolescence prevent dementia, as it only observed an association between the two factors. It also did not include other factors that may influence the risk of developing the disease, such as genetics, prenatal health, and lifestyle in adulthood.
The researchers emphasize that more studies are needed to understand the reason for this link, and to find out whether the cognitive abilities that develop in childhood and adolescence can actually play a role in maintaining brain health and reducing the risk of developing dementia later in life.
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