STUDY FINDS BETTER-EDUCATED OLDER ADULTS HAD GREATER DECLINES IN WORD MEMORY THAN LESS-EDUCATED PEERS

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STUDY FINDS BETTER-EDUCATED OLDER ADULTS HAD GREATER DECLINES IN WORD MEMORY THAN LESS-EDUCATED PEERS
19 May 2007 - University of Southern California

Study director Eileen Crimmins said she wouldn’t recommend halting any schooling based on the results. The findings, published in the current issue of Research on Aging, suggest that after age 70, educated adults may begin to lose the ability to use their schooling to compensate for normal, age-related memory loss.

Study director Eileen Crimmins of the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology said she wouldn’t recommend halting any schooling based on the results. But they help us understand the way we learn and unlearn as we age.

“We are starting to find evidence of how the brain works over the entire lifecycle,” Crimmins said. “This study clarifies that while cognitive performance in old age is related to early life education, not all aspects of cognitive performance relate to education in the same way.”

More education is consistently related to better cognitive performance in older adults and in this study, too, individuals with higher levels of education had a higher ability at any given age. However, it was those with the highest education whose performance dropped the most.

“Even though we find in this research that those with higher education do better on mental status tests that look for dementia-like symptoms, education does not protect against more normal, age-related declines, like those seen on memory tests,” said lead author Dawn Alley of the University of Pennsylvania, who conducted the research while she was a doctoral student at the USC Davis School.

Verbal memory was tested by immediate and delayed recall, which consisted of 10 common nouns read aloud by the interviewer, followed by a request for respondents to remember as many nouns as possible from the list. Five minutes later, participants were asked how many of the words they could recall.

Data came from the Asset and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old study, a nationally representative longitudinal study of older Americans. Participants, born in 1923 or earlier, were interviewed up to four different times through 1993 and 2000.

Researchers noted that while the excess decline among those with more education is small, it is significant; however, they cautioned that other factors could account for the difference, such as the possibility that less educated adults had a greater rate of decline earlier in life, before the data was collected.

Kristen Sellers, of the National Women’s Health Action Network, also contributed to the study.

http://www.usc.edu

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