Education may provide mental reserves that help to keep the brain agile into old age. Those are the findings of a new study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Other studies have shown similar correlations between years of education and risk of Alzheimer’s disease. But the current study suggested that even those individuals whose brains appeared “scarred” by Alzheimer’s could still be cognitively normal, especially if they had received more years of formal education.

The researchers found that seniors with the most years of formal education scored higher on tests of memory, learning and thinking compared to those who spent the least time in school. In fact, many of the highly educated individuals who did well on the memory tests were shown by imaging tests to have the same kind of damage seen in the brains of those with Alzheimer’s disease. The findings were published in the Archives of Neurology, one of the medical journals from the American Medical Association.

Read the rest of this article to learn more about what the study showed: Cognitive Reserve Theory