Half a million teens took a test in 1960. They could predict whether they contract Alzheimer's disease.

In 1960, 15-year-old Joan Levin took a test that turned out to be the largest survey ever of American teenagers. It took two and a half days to administer and 440,000 students from 1,353 public, private and parish high schools across the country – including Parkville 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, researchers – and more recently in the fight against Alzheimer's disease – continue to use the answers provided by her and her peers. A study published this month found that subjects who did well on exams had lower incidences of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia in their 60s and 70s than those who did poorly.

Joan Levin keeps his yearbook from the 1960s. Michael S. Williamson / Washington Post

Known as Project Talent, the test was funded by the US government, which had been concerned about Sputnik's recent successful launch of the Soviet Union, according to which Americans were late in the space race.

Students answered questions about education and general knowledge, as well as their family life, health, aspirations, and personality traits. The test aimed to identify students fit for science and engineering. Janis Joplin, a high school student at Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur, Texas, and Jim Morrison, a junior at George Washington High School in Alexandria, Virginia, took part in the tests.

In recent years, researchers have used Project Talent data for follow-up studies, including one published on Sept. 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Led by researchers at the American Institutes for Research in Washington, the organization that administered the test originally, it compared the results of more than 85,000 early teens.

The study examined how students achieved results in 17 areas of cognitive ability, such as language, abstract reasoning, mathematics, visual and spatial prowess, and found that teens their 60s and 60s. early 70s.

Specifically, people with lower mechanical reasoning and lower word memory were more likely to develop dementia later: men in half of the lowest rated were 17% more likely. The worst performance of the other test components also showed an increased likelihood of late dementia.

It is estimated that 5.7 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer's disease and, in the absence of scientific breakthroughs to fight the disease, the Alzheimer's Association predicts that this number will reach 14 million by 2050, the cost care exceeding $ 1 trillion per year.

The 1960 test could have the same effect as the groundbreaking Framingham study, a decades-old study of Massachusetts men that led to a reduction in heart disease in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, said Susan Lapham, director from Project co-author of the JAMA study.

"If the Talent project can focus on dementia, the Framingham study on heart disease will make a difference in public health," she said. "This indicates that we should design interventions for high school children and perhaps even earlier to perhaps keep their brains active from an early age."

This could include testing children, identifying those with lower scores and "getting them involved in a program to make sure they are not missing and at risk of danger," she said. .

For years, the project's talent data was little used because the participants could not be found. In the 1980s, a proposal to find them failed because, in the era of the Internet before, the task seemed too daunting.

In 2009, as student meetings of the 50th high school arrived, the researchers decided to use these meetings as an opportunity to reach a large number of them (about a quarter died). They then used the test data to study the effects of diabetes and personality type on end-of-life health.

But when contacted, the most interested participants were 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 students were expected to receive their results shortly after taking the test, some students said they did not remember getting them.

Receiving his results recently has been interesting in hindsight, 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 marks in terms of vocabulary, abstract reasoning and verbal memory, and lower marks in board reading and writing.

A low score does 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 kind of planner and I look forward," she said. "I would like my daughter and her family to have an idea of ​​what to expect."

75-year-old Karen Altpeter of Prescott, Wisconsin, also said she would probably like to know about her risks, since her mother and grandmother both had Alzheimer's disease. She liked the idea that the answers she had given in adolescence could help science.

"If there is an opportunity, I can tell the difference simply by passing a test and answering some questions, I will do it," she said. "I want to have the opportunity to make things better for people."

Previous studies had suggested a relationship between cognitive abilities in young people and dementia later in life, including a follow-up of 800 nuns earlier in the 20th century and found that the complexity of written age sentences.

But this study included only women and no minority. Project Talent's subjects reflected the demographic composition of the country in 1960.

Today, the country is more diversified. According to a CDC study released this week, the number of minorities aged 65 and over is expected to grow faster than the general population, and by 2060, about 3.2 million Hispanics and 2.2 million Africans from Latin America will have Alzheimer's disease. African Americans and Hispanics both have a higher prevalence of Alzheimer's disease and related diseases than non-Hispanic whites.

A follow-up study currently underway on a smaller sample of the talent pool – 22,500 people – will be weighted to reflect the composition of today's population and will deepen age-related brain and cognition changes.

It will examine the long-term impact of school quality and school segregation on brain health and the impact of adolescent socio-economic disadvantage on cognitive and psychosocial resilience, with a focus on about the experiences of the color participants.

This study includes a paper-based study of demographics, family and marital history, residential history, educational attainment, and health status; an online survey on health, mental health and quality of life; and a detailed cognitive telephone assessment of items such as word memory and countdown.

Researchers will also evaluate the quality of schools to determine whether there are racial or ethnic differences in the benefits of attending higher quality schools and will further explore the reasons why some people develop dementia and dementia. others no.

The follow-up, which is expected to be completed next year, is funded by the National Institutes of Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, and conducted by AIR in collaboration with researchers at Columbia University Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health. 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. A few months ago, the researchers who conducted the follow-up study contacted her and tested her cognitive abilities and asked her questions about her story.

"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 for the National Science Foundation, Jacobs said that he would be interested in learning if he is at risk for dementia. "The statistical correlation does not necessarily apply to you, but it can give you some probabilities," he said. "I guess the basic human nature would be," Yeah, you'd probably want to know. "

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