It’s not often we get to talk about Alzheimer’s or dementia in this space. This is, after all, a youth culture update. What will we be talking about next—arthritis? As it turns out, what youth do in school today may play a role in how well their brains function decades down the road.

In a study conducted out of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, researcher Serhiy Dekhtyar studied nearly 7,600 people age 65 and older. He found that subjects who did poorly in grade school compared to their peers were more likely to develop dementia later. That held true including when these people went on to do well in college and had intellectually stimulating jobs.

“Your early life baseline cognitive abilities play a role in later dementia risk, which we didn’t know before because we didn’t have data,” Dekhtyar said. “Now we have the data that show there is a component of early cognitive abilities that seems to still [have an effect] 50 or 60 years later.” (Time)