Overview
- Analysis of 86,149 adults aged roughly 51–90 across 27 European countries found multilingual participants aged more slowly than monolingual peers.
- Monolinguals showed more than double the risk of accelerated aging, while bilingualism cut risk by about 23% and trilingualism by about 49%, with greater protection for four or more languages.
- Biological aging was estimated with a bioconductual age gap derived from indicators spanning cardiovascular, sensory, functional and activity measures, reflecting organism‑wide aging rather than solely cognition.
- The association remained after controlling for socioeconomic status, immigration, education and exposome factors, based on AI models trained on thousands of health and behavior profiles.
- Authors advocate language learning as a public‑health tool and report preliminary Spain‑based analyses suggesting linguistic similarity may enhance protection, findings that remain provisional.