Emotional and Behavioral Changes in Older Adults With High Risk of Cognitive Impairment During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 is not only a threat to physical health but also a stressor to mental health, particularly for older adults. Previous studies have indicated that healthy older adults have resilience to cope with such stressful event through emotional and behavioral effort. However, very few have investigated the coping ability of older adults with High Risk of Cognitive Impairment (HRCI), as they are characterized with risk factors that can make them more vulnerable to COVID-19 in both physical and mental aspects. To examine whether older adults with HRCI were able to cope with and recover from the outbreak of COVID-19, we investigated the changes of their self-reported emotional states and intentions of taking protective behaviors between the outbreak period (data collected from February 17th to 24th, 2020) and the remission period (data collected from April 7th to 20th, 2020). The results showed that compared with the outbreak period, older adults with HRCI showed better emotional states and higher levels of intention to take more protective behaviors during the remission period. Subgroup analysis showed that even those who showed relatively poor coping abilities during the outbreak period could gradually improve their emotional states and intend to take more protective behaviors later on in the remission period. Therefore, these results suggested that older adults with HRCI were able to cope with and recover from the pandemic outbreak.

Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Czech citizens: how do depression and anxiety symptoms influence cognitive, behavioral, and emotional changes?

“…Taken together, there are many pieces of research on the topic COVID-19 pandemic related to behavioral changes (Chan et al, 2021 ; Fu et al, 2021 ; Lee et al, 2021 ), emotional changes (Fu et al, 2021 ; Chen et al, 2022 ; Dominte et al, 2022 ), and cognitive changes (Thagard, 2021 ), but none of the research examines all three types of changes at once relating to anxiety and depression symptoms in the Czech Republic. The finding emphasizes an urgent need to scale up to more researchers in this area.…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Aging in COVID-19

“…The United States and Italy are the two countries that have initiated the most cooperation in this field. The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for older adults not only to physical health but also to mental health [8,9]. Current research focuses on "behavior", "support", and "health", indicating a proactive transformation from basic research to the research of mental health and social support to improve interventions and the quality of life of elderly patients with COVID-19 [10].…”

Post COVID-19: Analysing and Addressing the Challenges Faced by Patients Following Intensive Care Treatment for COVID-19

“…Taken together, there are many pieces of research on the topic COVID-19 pandemic related to behavioral changes (Chan et al, 2021;Fu et al, 2021;Lee et al, 2021), emotional changes (Fu et al, 2021;Dominte et al, 2022), and cognitive changes (Thagard, 2021), but none of the research examines all three types of changes at once relating to anxiety and depression symptoms in the Czech Republic. The finding emphasizes an urgent need to scale up to more researchers in this area.…”