Study: Work in adulthood seen to significantly delay memory decline after age 60, supporting the Cognitive Reserve theory

Mem­o­ry Loss Slow­er for Work­ing Women (Med­Page Today):

Work­ing women had slow­er mem­o­ry decline as they aged than women who had not worked out­side the home, a lon­gi­tu­di­nal study found.

Non-work­ing moth­ers were twice as like­ly to devel­op mem­o­ry impair­ment at age 70 as work­ing mar­ried moth­ers, report­ed Eliz­a­beth Rose Maye­da, PhD, MPH, of the UCLA Field­ing School of Pub­lic Health in Los Ange­les, and co-authors.

… “While there’s no debate that man­ag­ing a home and a fam­i­ly can be a com­plex and full-time job, our study sug­gests that engag­ing in paid work may offer some pro­tec­tion when it comes to mem­o­ry loss — pos­si­bly due to cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion, social engage­ment, or finan­cial secu­ri­ty,” she added.

The study had sev­er­al lim­i­ta­tions, the researchers said. Non-mar­i­tal part­ner­ships were not includ­ed in the analy­sis. The researchers relied on ret­ro­spec­tive report­ing of employ­ment, mar­riage, and par­ent­hood. They could not dis­tin­guish full-time from part-time employ­ment and did not account for vol­un­teer work. Mem­o­ry per­for­mance was eval­u­at­ed with a brief assess­ment of word recall and oth­er cog­ni­tive domains were not examined.

The Study:

Asso­ci­a­tion of work-fam­i­ly expe­ri­ence with mid- and late-life mem­o­ry decline in US women (Neu­rol­o­gy). From the Abstract:

• Objec­tive: To test the hypoth­e­sis that life­course pat­terns of employ­ment, mar­riage, and chil­drea­r­ing influ­ence lat­er-life rate of mem­o­ry decline among women, we exam­ined the rela­tion­ship of work-fam­i­ly expe­ri­ences between ages 16 and 50 years and mem­o­ry decline after age 55 years among U.S. women.
• Meth­ods: Par­tic­i­pants were women ages 55+ years in the Health and Retire­ment Study. Par­tic­i­pants report­ed employ­ment, mar­i­tal, and par­ent­hood sta­tus­es between ages 16 and 50 years. Sequence analy­sis was used to group women with sim­i­lar work-fam­i­ly life his­to­ries; we iden­ti­fied 5 pro­files char­ac­ter­ized by sim­i­lar tim­ing and tran­si­tions of com­bined work, mar­i­tal, and par­ent­hood sta­tus­es. Mem­o­ry per­for­mance was assessed bien­ni­al­ly 1995–2016. We esti­mat­ed asso­ci­a­tions between work-fam­i­ly pro­files and lat­er-life mem­o­ry decline with lin­ear mixed-effects mod­els adjust­ed for prac­tice effects, base­line age, race/ethnicity, birth region, child­hood socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus, and edu­ca­tion­al attainment.
• Results: There were 6,189 study par­tic­i­pants … Between ages 55 and 60, mem­o­ry scores were sim­i­lar across work-fam­i­ly pro­files. After age 60, aver­age rate of mem­o­ry decline was 50% greater among women whose work-fam­i­ly pro­files did not include work­ing for pay post-child­bear­ing, com­pared with those who were work­ing mothers.
• Con­clu­sions: Women who worked for pay in ear­ly adult­hood and midlife expe­ri­enced slow­er rates of lat­er-life mem­o­ry decline, regard­less of mar­i­tal and par­ent­hood sta­tus, sug­gest­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion in the paid labor force may pro­tect against lat­er-life mem­o­ry decline.

The Study in Context:

• Study: High Cog­ni­tive Reserve (CR) seen to sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er demen­tia risk even in the pres­ence of high Alzheimer’s Dis­ease (AD) neuropathology
• Build Your Cog­ni­tive Reserve: An Inter­view with Dr. Yaakov Stern
• Sys­tem­at­ic review finds ten lifestyle fac­tors that clear­ly impact the prob­a­bil­i­ty of devel­op­ing Alzheimer’s dis­ease (AD)
• How learn­ing changes your brain
• Solv­ing the Brain Fit­ness Puz­zle Is the Key to Self-Empow­ered Aging