Dynamic relations between longitudinal morphological, behavioral, and emotional indicators and cognitive impairment: evidence from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey

Abstract

Background We aimed to assess the effects of body mass index (BMI), activities of daily living (ADL), and subjective well-being (SWB) on cognitive impairment and propose dynamic risk prediction models for aging cognitive decline. Methods We leveraged the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey from 1998 to 2018. Cognitive status was measured using the Chinese Mini-Mental State Examination. We employed repeated measures correlation to assess associations, linear mixed-effect models to characterize the longitudinal changes, and Cox proportional hazard regression to model survival time. Dynamic predictive models were established based on the Bayesian joint model and deep learning approach named dynamic-DeepHit. Marginal structural Cox models were adopted to control for time-varying confounding factors and assess effect sizes. Results ADL, SWB, and BMI showed protective effects on cognitive impairment after controlling observed confounding factors, with respective direct hazard ratios of 0.756 (0.741, 0.771), 0.912 (0.902, 0.921), and 0.919 (0.909, 0.929). Dynamic risk predictive models manifested high accuracy (best AUC = 0.89). ADL was endowed with the best predictive capability, although the combination of BMI, ADL, and SWB showed the most remarkable performance. Conclusions BMI, ADL, and SWB are protective factors for cognitive impairment. A dynamic prediction model using these indicators can efficiently identify vulnerable individuals with high accuracy. Supplementary information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-024-21072-w.