Bilingualism in older Mexican-American immigrants is associated with higher scores on cognitive screening

BACKGROUND: Bilingualism may protect against cognitive aging and delay the onset of dementia. However, studies comparing monolinguals and bilinguals on such metrics have produced inconsistent results complicated by confounding variables and methodological concerns. METHODS: We addressed this issue by comparing cognitive performance in a more culturally homogeneous cohort of older Spanish-speaking monolingual (n = 289) and Spanish-English bilingual (n = 339) Mexican-American immigrants from the Sacramento Longitudinal Study on Aging. RESULTS: After adjusting for demographic differences and depressive symptoms, both groups performed similarly at baseline on verbal memory but the bilingual group performed significantly better than the monolingual group on a cognitive screening test, the Modified Mini-Mental State Examination (3MS; p < 0.001). Group differences on the 3MS were driven by language/executive and language/praxis factors. Within the bilingual group, neither language of testing nor degree of bilingualism was significantly associated with 3MS or verbal memory scores. Amongst individuals who performed in the normal or better range on both tests at baseline and were followed for an average of 6 years, both monolinguals and bilinguals exhibited similar rates of cognitive decline on both measures. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that bilingualism is associated with modest benefits in cognitive screening performance in older individuals in cross-sectional analyses that persist across longitudinal analyses. The effects of bilingualism should be considered when cognitively screening is performed in aging immigrant populations. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12877-016-0368-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.