Alzheimer's and the Great Depression: Do Early-life Deprivation and Social Inequalities Impact Late-life Cognitive Decline?

• In Event: 127 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Paper Session: Table 02. Cognitive Inequality

Abstract

This project has two main research questions: (1) What is the association between late-life cognitive decline and sociodemographic and health characteristics?; and (2) Does the “natural experiment” of the Great Depression in the U.S. provide evidence that there is an association between prenatal or childhood exposure to food shortage and stress and late-life cognitive decline (cohort effects)? I test five hypotheses related to those questions. The empirical work uses ten waves of the U.S. Health and Retirement Survey, from 1992 to 2010, operationalizing cognitive decline as self- or proxy-reported diagnosis of memory disease. My results suggest that exposure to the Great Depression significantly increases the likelihood of being diagnosed with a memory disease (OR = 1.68, p<0.001). Furthermore, sex (OR=.74, p < .001), stroke one year prior to diagnosis (OR=1.3, p < .001), level of emotional depression two years prior (OR=1.2, p<.001), BMI two years prior (OR=.98, p<.01), and late-life wealth two years prior (OR=.93, p<.01) are associated with the likelihood of a memory disease diagnosis, net of other effects. Hispanic ethnicity has a significant impact in the models until cohort membership is included, while being Black is no longer significant once chronic illnesses are included. In contrast to the cognitive reserve hypothesis, neither educational attainment nor occupation is significant when controlling for other factors. I offer some potential explanations for these results.

Author

• Jo Mhairi Hale, University of California-Davis