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New Evidence of Healthier Aging: Positive Cohort Effects on Verbal Fluency
Fernando Massa1, Alejandra Marroig1, Joe Rodgers2
1Instituto de Estadística, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay.
Innovation in Aging
|October 17, 2024
Summary
Later-born individuals show slower verbal fluency decline with age, indicating significant cohort effects on cognitive aging trajectories. These effects benefit all levels of verbal fluency across the lifespan.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive aging research
- Neuroscience
- Gerontology
Background:
- Cross-sectional studies suggest improved cognition in later-born cohorts.
- Longitudinal evidence on cohort effects in cognitive decline rate is limited.
- Cohort effect consistency across cognitive trajectory distributions is under-explored.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate cohort effects on the aging trajectories of verbal fluency.
- To examine variability of cohort effects across the full distribution of cognitive aging.
- To determine if cohort effects influence the rate of age-related cognitive decline.
Main Methods:
- Utilized 9 waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA) data.
- Developed sex and education-adjusted longitudinal norms for verbal fluency.
- Employed quantile mixed models with age modeled by splines to assess birth cohort effects across 10th, 50th, and 90th quantiles.
Main Results:
- Later-born cohorts exhibit a less pronounced decline in verbal fluency with age (p < .001).
- Verbal fluency quantiles are consistently higher in later-born cohorts across all ages.
- Cohort effects significantly impact the entire spectrum of verbal fluency trajectories.
Conclusions:
- Cohort effects demonstrably influence longitudinal cognitive aging, specifically verbal fluency.
- Cognitive aging is characterized by cohort-dependent trajectories affecting all performance levels.
- Findings highlight the importance of considering birth cohort in understanding cognitive decline in older adults.
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