Correlation Between Performance in Memory Tasks, Working Activity, and Years of School in a Mexican Sample of Elderly Health Adults

Abstract

Dementia has become an actual concern considering the increasing number of elderly adults. The cost for families and society has become a real problem for the public policies in Mexico, where there is not an effective system of cognitive prevention. The objectives of this investigation were: (1) Recognize if there is a direct relation between the educational level and the maintenance of memory; and (2) Determine the presence of relations between the development of different kinds of activity in life of the adult and their influence into memory. A battery of memory tasks (immediate, mediatized, auditory-verbal, tactile, visuospatial) was applied to a sample of 80 elderly adults (40 males and 40 females) with different educational level (more than six years of education and less than 6 years). All the adults got more than 27 points in Mini Mental State Examination and had less than 10 points in the Geriatric Depression Scale. The findings of this study suggest that education is the principal factor of protection in adults; it has an outcome to compensate the effects of retirement and changing of lifestyle. Therefore, the systems of activity, which consist of what the person did during their life, also have a real effect in the possibility of older adults to pay more attention in usual activities detect their mistakes and have a better chance to recover information in their different modalities.