Secretariat, Alumni Association, IDAC
Date Friday, 30 August 2019, 13:30 to 15:00
Room 2F Seminar Room, Center for Smart Aging Research, IDAC
Title Cross-sectional and longitudinal factors affecting cognitive function in older adults: a pan European cohort study based on the survey of health, ageing and retirement in Europe (SHARE)
Speaker Raquel Cervigón Abad
Affiliation Department of Electronics, Electrical, Automatics and Communications Engineering, University of Castilla-La Mancha
Organizer Nouchi Rui (Department of Cognitive Health Science・ext 8952)
Abstract Physical and social activities play a major role for healthy ageing even in older age. There is a lack of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies explicitly dealing the factors influencing cognitive function in older adults. Therefore, the aims of this study are a) to determine the changes in cognitive function (CF) in 69 to 80 year olds in Europe and to identify factors associated with CF in cross-section and b) to identify longitudinal risk factors for CF in prior active persons. This study is using data of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). SHARE is a cross-national panel database including individual data of the non-institutionalized population aged 50+ from 27 European countries.
For the present paper, we included a cohort that participated in all first four waves of SHARE (2007-2015) aged 60-to-80-years from 10 European countries. To identify cross-sectional and longitudinal associations, we calculated prevalence odds ratios and hazard ratios with 95% confidence intervals. The results indicated that measures of grip strength, sad or depressed last month, hopes for the future, enjoyment and feels lonely shared age-related variance with measures of perceptual speed, episodic memory and verbal fluency score. CF was associated with several interpersonal factors and strength of association was similar for men and women for almost all investigated factors. Statistically significant associated with CF were social factors as low educational level, gender and gender. Therefore, the variance shared between cognitive variables was substantially reduced after controlling the influence of age.