The Relationship between Cognitive Impairment and Social Vulnerability among the Elderly: Evidence from an Unconditional Quantile Regression Analysis in China

Abstract

As the global proportion of the elderly population has been growing rapidly, it has become important to better understand the holistic social factors involved in cognitive impairment in the elderly. To investigate the relationship between social vulnerability and cognitive impairment in the elderly, this study applied an unconditional quantile regression model on open source health survey data in China. It was used to estimate the relationship for full sample and subsamples divided by different levels of a specific covariate. It was found that the cognitive impairment had a positive association with social vulnerability, and this relationship is stronger at the higher cognitive impairment quantiles. The cognitive impairment of females and elderly who took less exercise; had lower self-rated health; had greater incidences of depression, chronic diseases, and physical limitations; and consumed less fruit and vegetables, milk and tea were more related to social vulnerability. These results provide some insights into the strategies that could be used by the elderly to decrease the risk of cognitive impairment.

Medical insurance and health equity in health service utilization among the middle-aged and older adults in China: a quantile regression approach

“…First, the dependent variable in our dataset is highly left-skewed distributed, which suggests the advantages of quantile regressions over ordinary least squares (OLS). Second, quantile regression techniques have been widely used to study inequity issues [2,[13][14][15][16]. In this study, quantile regressions allow for estimation of different impacts of medical insurance types along the whole conditional distribution of health service utilizations, while the most commonly used OLS models are more suitable for estimation of mean utilization of health services.…”

The value that social workers’ competencies add to health care: An integrative review

“…4.4.2 | The value that social workers' integrated competencies added to health care Based on this review, studies investigated social workers' competencies with regard to patient care and focused on the fields that have been identified as core competencies for both social and healthcare professionals (CSWE, 2015;Langings & Borgemans, 2015). However, the added value of social workers' integrated competencies has been highlighted by studies that focused on the most vulnerable groups, such as older people (McGilton et al, 2018;Ramgård et al, 2015;Stanhope et al, 2015;Webbkamigad et al, 2020), families with small children (Gearing et al, 2007;Maybery et al, 2014) and patients with mental illness (Palmer et al, 2018;Stanhope et al, 2015;Zhao et al, 2019) and substance abuse (Daw et al, 2017;Stanhope et al, 2015).…”

“…It has been reported that when patients and their caregivers have multiple chronic conditions (Webbkamigad et al, 2020) and complex needs (Spckalingam et al, 2020), they require care for longer periods of time (Palmer et al, 2018;Zhao et al, 2019) and that those need to be provided by multi-dimensional support services (DeGraaf et al, 2020;Lee et al, 2019;Peters et al, 2018). Such patients would benefit from early needs assessments and easy access to low-threshold services (Spitzer et al, 2015).…”