Age, education and gender effects on neuropsychological functions in healthy Indian older adults

Abstract

It is essential to use culturally appropriate, sensitive and specific tests that reflect true cognitive performance. However, several factors including age, education and gender can influence neuropsychological test performance.ObjectiveTo examine the effects of age, education and gender on neuropsychological function in older adults using measures of global cognitive screening, attention, working memory, executive functions, memory, construction, language and parietal focal signs.MethodsThis is a cross sectional normative study of 180 community-dwelling normal older adults. All participants were screened with the Hindi Mental Status Examination (HMSE), Everyday Activities Scale for India (EASI), Edinburgh handedness inventory (EDI) and MINI Screen, and followed by a detailed neuropsychological assessment.ResultsStepwise regression analysis revealed that education was associated with better performance on all the neuropsychological tests. Females performed significantly better on measures of memory. Further, most of the illiterate subjects, including low educated participants, refused to cooperate on measures of executive functioning.ConclusionEducation was found to be the strongest determinant of neuropsychological test performance followed by age and gender. Our study demonstrates that Indian healthy normal older adults with low education perform poorly on measures of planning and working memory. Traditional measures of planning and working memory should be avoided or used cautiously in the presence of low education. There is an urgent need to develop tasks for measuring executive functions, especially in low educated Indian older adults.

The Changes of the Cognitive and Psychomotor Functions in the Chronic Cannabis Users after a Month of Remission

“…Additionally, we found that age and duration of education could predict cognitive function tests (in the study AMIPB-A and MOCA). Similar to our study, Tripathi et al 49 found that age and duration of education were neurocognitive test performance determinants and suggested that traditional measures of planning and working memory should be avoided or used cautiously in the presence of low education. Duration of education also predicted psychomotor function and this may be due to positive correlation between cognitive functions and psychomotor function as we have demonstrated in the present study.…”

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“…It has been demonstrated that culture and demographic variables can affect performance on the Digit span test. 1 - 5 Indian older adults differ from western counterparts in terms of culture, literacy and exposure to psychological testing. 4 , 5 There is a paucity of research on the usefulness of the digit span, especially amongst elderly.…”

“… 1 - 5 Indian older adults differ from western counterparts in terms of culture, literacy and exposure to psychological testing. 4 , 5 There is a paucity of research on the usefulness of the digit span, especially amongst elderly. However, available research on other cognitive tests indicates that higher educational level is associated with better performance on several cognitive tests.…”

“… 4 , 8 There are several empirical studies from the Indian subcontinent indicating that older participants perform poorly on several cognitive tests. 4 , 5 , 9 , 10…”

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“…Comparação entre os resultados dos estudos do TFV com sujeitos entre 1 e 4 anos de estudo. -COSTA et al, 2011;LIU et al, 2011;SPOSITO et al, 2015;TRIPATHI et al, 2014). Este efeito pode ter como explicações alterações associadas ao envelhecimento tais como a diminuição no volume cerebral, redução dos neurotransmissores ou concentração alterada dos metabólitos cerebrais (COLLINSON et al, 2014).…”