Remembering to carry out intended actions is important for the effective performance of daily activities, but generally declines with age. This study aimed to establish the prevalence of prospective memory impairment in the elderly population, describe the age function and identify risk factors for impairment. An event-based prospective memory test was administered to 11,956 participants aged 65 in the screening stage of a population-based study, the Medical Research Council Cognitive Function and Ageing Study (MRC CFAS). Only 54% of the sample succeeded on the task. Logistic regression analysis showed that successful performance was strongly and linearly related to age, and that male gender, less education and lower social status substantially increased the risk of prospective memory impairment. There was a very high prevalence of prospective memory impairment in 388 individuals with very mild dementia, of whom only 8% succeeded on the task. These ®ndings raise concerns about the well-being and safety of many older people.

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Population-derived normative data are valuable for comparing an individual's score to the score which would be expected of the general population, given the individual's specific demographic characteristics.

BackgroundProjections of health and social care need are highly sensitive to assumptions about cohort trends in health and disability. We use a repeated population-based cross-sectional study from the Cambridgeshire centre of the UK Medical Research Council Cognitive Function and Ageing Study to investigate trends in the health of the young-old UK populationMethodsNon-overlapping cohorts of men and women aged 65–69 years in 1991/2 (n = 689) and 1996/7 (n = 687) were compared on: self-reported diseases and conditions; self-rated health; mobility limitation; disability by logistic regression and four-year survival by Cox Proportional Hazards Regression models, with adjustments for differences in socio-economic and lifestyle factors.ResultsSurvival was similar between cohorts (HR: 0.91, 95% CI: 0.62 to 1.32). There was a significant increase in the number of conditions reported between cohorts, with more participants reporting 3 or more conditions in the new cohort (14.2% vs. 10.1%). When individual conditions were considered, there was a 10% increase in the reporting of arthritis and a significant increase in the reporting of chronic airways obstruction (OR: 1.36, 95% CI: 1.04 to 1.78).ConclusionThis study provides evidence of rising levels of ill-health, as measured by the prevalence of self-reported chronic conditions, in the newer cohorts of the young-old. Though changes in diagnosis or reporting of disease cannot, as yet, be excluded, to better understand whether our findings reflect real increases in ill-health, investment should be made into improved population-based databases, linking self-report and objective measures of health and function, and including those in long-term care.

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