Objective: Chronic stress is associated with increased risk of cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. The objective of this study is to assess whether better stress coping is associated with slower rate of cognitive decline in community-dwelling older adults.
Design: Longitudinal cohort study
Setting: Community-dwelling older adults were recruited from 10 centers in South Korea
Participants: 1826 older adults who completed the Korean version of Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) and CERAD-K (Korean version of the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Battery) and the Korean version of the Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB)
Measurements: Resilience was measured by BRS. Cognitive function was assessed by using scores from CERAD-K and FAB from 2018/2019 and 2-year follow-up. Cognitive function change was calculated by subtracting the scores of CERAD-K and FAB in 2018/2019 from scores of CERAD-K and FAB in 2020/2021. Multivariable linear regression analysis was used to investigate the association between resilience and cognitive function change.
Results: Higher BRS score at baseline was associated with lesser decline in MMSE score after adjusting for age, sex, education years, smoking status, hypertension, diabetes and depression (B,0.175; 95%CI, 0.025 - 0.325) for 2 years, which represents global cognitive function. Other cognitive function measurements (word list memory, word list recall, world list recognition, digit span, trail making test-A, and FAB) did not change significantly in association with BRS score at baseline.
Conclusion: These findings suggest that better stress coping ability, meaning faster termination of the stress response, may limit the decline in cognitive function.