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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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The role of cognitive reserve on terminal decline
— a cross-cohort analysis from two European studies: OCTO-Twin, Sweden, and Newcastle 85+, UK | | Author(s) | Dorina Cadar, Blossom C M Stephan, Carol Jagger |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 31, no 6, June 2016 |
| Publisher | Wiley Blackwell, June 2016 |
| Pages | pp 601-610 |
| Source | www.orangejournal.org |
| Keywords | Cognitive impairment ; Terminal illness ; Dying ; Education ; Socio-economic groups ; Longitudinal surveys ; Sweden ; England. |
| Annotation | Cognitive performance shows a marked deterioration in close proximity to death, as postulated by the terminal decline hypothesis. The effect of education on the rate of terminal decline in the oldest old (i.e. persons 85+ years) has been controversial and not entirely understood. In the current study the authors investigated the rate of decline prior to death with a special focus on the role of education and socioeconomic position, in two European longitudinal studies of ageing: the Origins of Variance in the Old-Old: Octogenarian Twins (OCTO-Twin), based in Sweden, and the Newcastle 85+ study. A process-based approach was used in which individuals' cognitive scores were aligned according to distance to death. In a coordinated analysis, multilevel models were employed to examine associations between different markers of cognitive reserve (education and socioeconomic position) and terminal decline using the mini-mental state examination (MMSE), controlling for age at baseline, sex, dementia incidence and time to death from the study entry to the time of death within each cohort. The current findings suggest that education was positively associated with higher MMSE scores prior to death in the OCTO-Twin, but not in the Newcastle 85+ study, independent of socioeconomic position and other factors such as baseline age, sex and time to death from the study entry. However education was not associated with the rate of terminal decline in both of these studies. These results offer only partial support to the cognitive reserve hypothesis and cognitive performance prior to death. (JL). |
| Accession Number | CPA-160520207 A |
| Classmark | E4: CV: CX: V: T4: 3J: 76P: 82 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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