Predictors of cognitive performance in healthy older adults

Human aging is a physiological, progressive, heterogeneous global process that causes a decline of all body systems, functions, and organs. Throughout this process, cognitive function suffers an incremental decline with broad interindividual variability. The first objective of this study was to examine the differences in cognitive performance per gender and the relationship between cognitive performance and the variables age, years of schooling, and depressive symptoms. The second objective was to identify predictor factors for global cognitive performance and of the domains orientation, language, memory, attention/calculation, visuospatial and executive function, abstraction, and identification. Five hundred seventy-three (573) cognitively healthy older adults aged ≥ 50 years were included in the study. The sociodemographic GDS-15 questionnaire and the Spanish version of the MoCA Test (v 7.3) were administered to assess depression symptoms and evaluate cognitive performance, respectively. Differences in cognitive performance per gender was assessed with Student's t-test for independent samples. The bivariate Pearson correlation was applied to examine the relationship between total scoring of cognitive performance and the variables age, years of schooling, and depressive symptoms. Different linear multiple regression analyses were performed to determine predictive variables for cognitive performance. We found gender-related cognitive performance differences. An association between age, years of schooling, and severity of depressive symptoms was observed. Age, years of schooling, and severity of depressive symptoms allow predicting cognitive performance, while gender does not.