A New Look at Cohort Trend and Underlying Mechanisms in Cognitive Functioning

Hui Zheng and J Scott Brown

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 2021, vol. 76, issue 8, 1652-1663

Abstract: ObjectivesThe prevalence of dementia in the United States seems to have declined over the last few decades. We investigate trends and their underlying mechanisms in cognitive functioning (CF) across 7 decades of birth cohorts from the Greatest Generation to Baby Boomers.MethodsData come from 30,191 participants of the 1996–2014 Health and Retirement Study. CF is measured as a summary score on a 35-point cognitive battery of items. We use generalized linear models to examine the trends in CF and explanatory variables across birth cohorts. Then, Karlson–Holm–Breen decomposition method is used to evaluate the contribution of each explanatory variable to the trend of CF.ResultsCF has been improving from the Greatest Generation to Late Children of Depression and War Babies, but then significantly declines since the Early-Baby Boomers and continues into Mid-Baby Boomers. This pattern is observed universally across genders, race/ethnicities, education groups, occupations, income, and wealth quartiles. The worsening CF among Baby Boomers does not originate from childhood conditions, adult education, or occupation. It can be attributed to lower household wealth, lower likelihood of marriage, higher levels of loneliness, depression and psychiatric problems, and more cardiovascular risk factors (e.g., obesity, physical inactivity, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, and heart disease).DiscussionThe worsening CF among Baby Boomers may potentially reverse past favorable trends in dementia as they reach older ages and cognitive impairment becomes more common if no effective interventions and policy responses are in place.

Keywords: Cognition; Cohort analysis; Dementia; Demography; Population aging (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbaa107 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:geronb:v:76:y:2021:i:8:p:1652-1663.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B is currently edited by Psychological Sciences - S. Duke Han, PhD and Social Sciences - Jessica A Kelley, PhD, FGSA

More articles in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B from The Gerontological Society of America Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().