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In 1960, 15-year-old Joan Levin did a test that turned out to be the largest survey ever conducted with American teens. The administration took two and a half days and included 440,000 students from 1,353 public, private and parish high schools across the country, including Parkville Senior High School in Parkville, Maryland, where she was a student.
"We knew at the time that they were going to follow up for a long time," said Levin – but she thought it meant about 20 years.
Fifty-eight years later, the answers she and her peers have given are still being used by researchers – most recently in the fight against Alzheimer's disease. A study published this month found that subjects who responded well to the questions in the adolescent test had a lower incidence of Alzheimer's dementia and associated dementia aged 60 to 70 than those with a poor score. .
Known as Project Talent, the test was funded by the US government, which was concerned about the recent successful launch by the Soviet Union of Sputnik and the fact that Americans were late in the space race .
Students answered questions about education and general knowledge, as well as their home life, health, aspirations, and personality traits. The test was aimed at identifying students with skills in science and engineering. Janis Joplin, a student at Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur, Texas, and Jim Morrison, a student at George Washington High School in Alexandria, Virginia, were among the participants.
In recent years, researchers have used Project Talent data for further studies, including one published Sept. 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Conducted by researchers from the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, the organization that had administered the test originally, it compared the results of more than 85,000 applicants to their spending data. and Medicare Spending 2012-2013 and discovered warning signs of dementia. as early as adolescence.
The study analyzed student achievement in 17 domains of cognitive ability, such as language, abstract reasoning, mathematics, clerical, visual and spatial feats, and found that people with higher scores Low in adolescence were more likely to contract Alzheimer's disease in their 60s and early 70s.
Specifically, adolescents with weak mechanical reasoning and word memory were more likely to develop dementia later in life: men in the lowest scoring half had 17% more odds, while women with lower scores were 16% more likely. The poorer performance of the other test components also showed an increased likelihood of late dementia.
According to estimates, 5.7 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease and, in the absence of scientific breakthroughs to fight this disease, the Alzheimer's Association predicts that this number could reach 14 million by 2050, the cost of care reaching one trillion dollars a year.
The 1960 trial could look like the groundbreaking Framingham study, a decade-long study of men in Massachusetts that led to a reduction in heart disease in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, said Susan Lapham, Project Director. Talent. co-author of the JAMA study.
"If Project Talent can be for dementia like the Framingham study for heart disease, it will make a difference in public health," she said. "This indicates that we should be designing interventions for high school kids and maybe even earlier to maybe keep their brains active from an early age."
This could include testing children, identifying those with lower scores and "enrolling in a program to ensure they have not missed out and may be exposed to risk, "she said.
For years, Project Talent data did not work because participants could not be found. A proposal made in the 1980s to try to find them failed because, in the era of the Internet, the task seemed too difficult.
In 2009, as the fiftieth high school student meetings drew near, the researchers decided to use them as an opportunity to reach a large number of them (about a quarter died). They were then able to use the test data to study things such as the effects of diabetes and personality type on the health of the future life.
But when contacted, the result that interested participants most was dementia, Lapham said. "They wanted it to be studied more than any other subject," she said. "They said," What I fear the most, is dementia. "
While the students were supposed to have received their results shortly after taking the test, some students said they did not remember getting them.
Receiving his results recently was interesting for the decline, said Levin, a retired director of human resources who is now 73 and lives in Cockeysville, Maryland. Most of her marks were over 75%, with very high scores in vocabulary, abstract reasoning and verbal memory, and lower notes in reading charts and office tasks.
Low scores do not mean that a person will necessarily have dementia; the correlation is simply associated with a higher risk. But even if her scores had been lower, Levin said she would like to know. "I am a bit of a planner and I look to the future," she said. "I would like my daughter and her family to have some idea of what to expect."
Karen Altpeter, 75, of Prescott, Wisconsin, also said that she would probably also want to know her risks because her mother and grandmother are suffering from Alzheimer's disease. She liked the idea that the answers she had given in adolescence could help science.
"If I can make a difference just by passing a test and answering questions, I will do it," she said. "I want to be able to make things better for people."
Previous studies have suggested a relationship between cognitive abilities in young people and dementia in the future, including the one that followed 800 nuns in the early 20th century and that revealed the complexity of the sentences used to write personal essays to 21 years was correlated with the risk of dementia observed in the past. age.
But this study included only women and not minorities. Project Talent's subjects reflected the demographic mix of the country in 1960.
Today, however, the country is more diversified. The number of minorities aged 65 and over is expected to grow faster than the general population, and by 2060 there will be about 3.2 million Hispanics and 2.2 million African Americans with the disease. Alzheimer's and related dementias, according to a recently published CDC study. African Americans and Hispanics both have a higher prevalence of Alzheimer's and related diseases than non-Hispanic whites.
A follow-up study currently underway on a smaller sample of the project's talent pool of 22,500 will be weighted to reflect the composition of the current population and deepen age-related brain and cognition changes. over time.
It will examine the long-term impact of school quality and segregation on brain health and the impact of adolescent socio-economic disadvantage on cognitive and psychosocial resilience, with particular emphasis on participants of color.
This study includes a paper survey of demographics, family and marital history, residential history, education level and health status; an online survey on health, mental health and quality of life; and a detailed cognitive assessment by phone of things such as word memory and countdown.
Researchers will also evaluate the quality of schools to determine if there are racial or ethnic differences between the benefits of attending high quality schools, and examine in more detail why some people develop dementia and others do not.
The follow-up, which is expected to be completed next year, is funded by the National Institutes of Health, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, and is led by AIR in collaboration with researchers at Columbia University Medical Center. and the University of Southern California.
Cliff Jacobs, 75, of Arlington, Va., Who passed the Project Talent test as a high school student in Tenafly, New Jersey, does not remember hearing about results. Then, a few months ago, researchers who conducted the follow-up study contacted him to test his cognitive abilities and ask him questions about his history.
"They deepened my problems growing up – did my parents smoke and was exposed to second-hand smoke? Yeah, my parents both smoked and I did not even think it was something to consider, "he said.
A retired geoscientist from the National Science Foundation, Jacobs said that he would be interested in learning if he was at risk of developing dementia. "The statistical correlation does not necessarily apply to you, but they can give you probabilities," he said. "I guess the basic human nature would be," Yeah, you'll probably want to know. "
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