Age-Related Cognitive Decline During Normal Aging: The Complex Effect of Education

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to further analyze the effects of education on cognitive decline during normal aging. An 806-subject sample was taken from five different Mexican regions. Participants ranged in age from 16 to 85 years. Subjects were grouped into four educational levels: illiterate, 1-4, 5-9, and 10 or more years of education, and four age ranges: 16-30, 31-50, 51-65, and 66-85 years. A brief neuropsychological test battery (NEUROPSI), standardized and normalized in Spanish, was administered. The NEUROPSI test battery includes assessment of orientation, attention, memory, language, visuoperceptual abilities, motor skills, and executive functions. In general, test scores were strongly associated with level of educational, and differences among age groups were smaller than differences among education groups. However, there was an interaction between age and education such as that among illiterate individuals scores of participants 31-50 years old were higher than scores of participants 16-30 years old for over 50% of the tests. Different patterns of interaction among educational groups were distinguished. It was concluded that: (a) The course of life-span changes in cognition are affected by education. Among individuals with a low level of education, best neuropsychological test performance is observed at an older age than among higher-educated subjects; and (b) there is not a single relationship between age-related cognitive decline and education, but different patterns may be found, depending upon the specific cognitive domain.

P300 and Neuropsychological Assessment in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer Dementia

“…The neuropsychological assessment consisted of tests of Attention (Trail Making Test Part A and Letter A Cancelation including Hits and Time in seconds as the dependent variables for both tests), Memory (Memory for three Phrases, Word List including Immediate recall, Delayed recall and Recognition, and recall of the Complex Figure of Rey), Language (Phonological Fluency – Letter FAS and Boston naming test), Constructional Praxis (Copy of the Complex Figure of Rey), and Executive Functions (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test including Hits, Number of Categories and Conceptualization, and the Semantic Fluency Test – Animals). For a more detailed description of these tests and the Spanish norms see Ardila et al (1994, 2000). …”

“… *Could not complete the assessment; Cut-off values: were obtained from the norms corresponding to the same population (Ardila et al, 1994, 2000); Lawton: Scale of Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) . The P300 variables collected during the first assessment and the Neuropsychological variables collected during the second assessment are presented. In order to assist in the clinical decision, the neuropsychological data from the first and second assessment were contrasted.…”

“… *Could not complete the assessment; Cut-off values: were obtained from the norms corresponding to the same population (Ardila et al, 1994, 2000); Lawton: Scale of Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) .…”

Telephone-based screening tools for mild cognitive impairment and dementia in aging studies: a review of validated instruments

“…However, decline in cognitive domains is not uniform across all individuals, and even in the same individual, throughout aging (Riddle, 2007). For instance, factors that can possibly confer a risk of decline in cognitive performance, other than age in itself, are low(er) level of schooling, institutionalization, female gender, depressive mood, and the presence of “unhealthy” lifestyle factors and/or of clinical pathologies (Ardila et al, 2000; Van Gool et al, 2003, 2007; Wilson et al, 2009; Yamamoto et al, 2009; Paulo et al, 2011; Köhler et al, 2012; Santos et al, 2012; Costa et al, 2013; Viscogliosi et al, 2013). This heterogeneity in cognitive aging, and the need to reach larger population samples, challenges the available instruments that currently exist to efficiently assess global cognition and screen/detect deviations from healthy (“normal”) cognitive aging to cognitive impairments and dementia.…”

Effect of aging, education, reading and writing, semantic processing and depression symptoms on verbal fluency

“…Another factor may be associated with the negative effect of age on lexical retrieval (Mansur, Radanovic, Rüegg, Mendonça, & Scaff, 2002;Obler, Au, & Albert, 1995;Taylor & Burke, 2002) and on inhibitory functions . However, age and education may act alone or in different forms of interaction, which suggests the existence of a complex effect between these variables, which may depend on the cognitive domain under study (Ardilla, Ostrosky-Solis, Rosselli, & Gomez, 2000). Studies using VFTs showed that education may play a role on the effect of age: (a) older people with a high educational level had a better performance when different task criteria were adopted than older people with an intermediate or low educational level (Henry & Phillips, 2006); (b) adults produced more words than older individuals only in the groups with up to four years of schooling (Rodrigues et al, 2008); and (c) people about 70 years old and a high educational level had a performance that was similar to young people about 20 years old with a low educational level (Federmeier et al, 2002).…”