Health, Memory Complaints and Cognitive Performance in Older Adults: Relationship Analysis

The aim of the present study was the examination of the relationships among multimorbidity and subjective and objective cognitive performance, as well as the role of some demographic, social and health variables. We also investigated the protective role of social participation and physical activity against the impact of multimorbidity on cognition. Subjective cognitive performance was measured by memory complaints, while the objective one (a part of it) was assessed by verbal fluency. Our sample consisted of 67 participants (58-81 years old) from the Universidad de Experiencia, Zamora, Spain. For the analyses was used the IBM SPSS 20. To examine the relationships between our basic variables we applied partial correlations, while we applied univariate ANOVAs for the rest of our analyses. Neurotism was our control variable. Results revealed that those of the participants who were older and had more diseases presented a more negative self-perceived health and negative perceived health was found to be correlated with worse results in verbal fluency. Multimorbidity itself was correlated negatively with the results in verbal fluency as well. Furthermore, those participants who had a higher educational level, a more intense cultural life and lived just with their partner were found to provide better results. Subjective performance was not found to be related to the objective one and the protective role of the examined variables was found to be different for each dimension.

It seems that multimorbidity is related to the verbal fluency directly, but it was also found to be related to self-rated health which was also related to the cognitive performance. However, it doesn't seem to be related to the subjective performance.