Summary: People born into families with members who live longer lives show better cognitive performance and a slower decline in cognitive processing speed as they age.
Source: Boston University
If you come from a family where people routinely live well into old age, you will likely have better cognitive function (the ability to clearly think, learn and remember) than peers from families where people die younger.
Researchers affiliated with the Long Life Family Study (LLFS) recently broadened that finding in a paper published in Gerontology, suggesting that people who belong to long-lived families also show slower cognitive decline over time.
The Long Life Family Study has enrolled over 5,000 participants from almost 600 families and has been following them for the past 15 years. The study is unique in that it enrolls individuals belonging to families with clusters of long-lived relatives. Since 2006, the LLFS has recruited participants belonging to two groups: the long-lived siblings (also called the proband generation) and their children. Since they share lifestyle and environmental factors, the spouses of these two groups have also been enrolled in the LLFS as a referent group.
To assess cognitive performance, the researchers administered a series of assessments to the study participants meant to test different domains of thinking, such as attention, executive function and memory, over two visits approximately eight years apart.
This allowed researchers to ask whether individuals from families with longevity have better baseline cognitive performance than their spouses do and whether their cognition declines more slowly than does that of their spouses.
To study this question, LLFS researchers used a model to determine the change in score on several neuropsychological tests from one visit to the next.
“This model allows us to assess both the cross-sectional effect of familial longevity at baseline visit and the longitudinal effect over follow-up time,” says co-lead author Mengtian Du, a doctoral student in biostatistics at Boston University School of Public Health.
They showed that individuals from long-lived families performed better than their spouses on two tests: a symbol coding test, which has participants match symbols to their corresponding numbers and provides insight into psychomotor processing speed, attention, and working memory, and a paragraph recall test, which asks participants to remember a short story and assesses episodic memory.
The researchers from the LLFS also found that individuals in the younger generation (participants born after 1935) exhibited a slower rate of cognitive decline on the symbol coding test than did their spouses.
“This finding of a slower decline in processing speed is particularly remarkable because the younger generation is relatively young at an average age of 60 years and therefore these differences are unlikely to be due to neurodegenerative disease,” explains corresponding author Stacy Andersen, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. “Rather we are detecting differences in normal cognitive aging.”
According to Andersen this suggests that people with familial longevity demonstrate resilience to cognitive aging. “By studying the LLFS families we can learn about the genetics, environmental factors, and lifestyle habits that are essential in optimizing cognitive health throughout the lifespan.”
Other co-authors on this study were Stephanie Cosentino and Nicole Schupf of Columbia University, Department of Neurology; Andrea Rosso of University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Epidemiology; Thomas Perls of Boston University School of Medicine and Paola Sebastiani of the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center.
Funding: Funding for this study was provided by the National Institute on Aging (K01AG057798 to S.L.A., 5U19AG063893 5U01AG023749 to S.C., 5U01AG023755 to T.T.P., 5U01AG023712, 5U01AG023744, 5U01AG023746); the Boston University School of Medicine Department of Medicine Career Investment Award to S.L.A.; and the Marty and Paulette Samowitz Foundation to T.T.P. Portions of these findings were presented as a poster at the 2020 International Neuropsychological Society Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, United States.
About this genetics and aging research news
Source: Boston University
Contact: Gina DiGravio – Boston University
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access.
“Slower Decline in Processing Speed Is Associated with Familial Longevity” by Stacy Andersen et al. Gerontology
Abstract
Slower Decline in Processing Speed Is Associated with Familial Longevity
Introduction: Cross-sectional analyses have associated familial longevity with better cognitive function and lower risk of cognitive impairment in comparison with individuals without familial longevity. The extent to which long-lived families also demonstrate slower rates of cognitive aging (i.e., change in cognition over time) is unknown. This study examined longitudinally collected data among 2 generations of the Long Life Family Study (LLFS) to compare rates of cognitive change across relatives and spouse controls.
Methods: We analyzed change in 6 neuropsychological test scores collected approximately 8 years apart among LLFS family members (n = 3,972) versus spouse controls (n = 1,092) using a Bayesian hierarchical model that included age, years of follow-up, sex, education, generation, and field center and all possible pairwise interactions.
Results: At a mean age of 88 years at enrollment in the older generation and 60 years in the younger generation, LLFS family members performed better than their spouses on the Digit Symbol Substitution Test (DSST) and the Logical Memory test. At follow-up, family members in the younger generation also showed slower decline than spouses on the DSST, whereas rates of change of Digit Span, fluency, and memory were similar between the 2 groups.
Discussion/Conclusion: Individuals in families with longevity appear to have better cognitive performance than their spouses for cognitive processes including psychomotor processing, episodic memory, and retrieval. Additionally, they demonstrate longer cognitive health spans with a slower decline on a multifactorial test of processing speed, a task requiring the integration of processes including organized visual search, working and incidental memory, and graphomotor ability. Long-lived families may be a valuable cohort for studying resilience to cognitive aging.
