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

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. To examine the effects of age, education and gender on neuropsychologic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Dementia & neuropsychologia 2014-06, Vol.8 (2), p.148-154
Main Authors: Tripathi, Ravikesh, Kumar, Keshav, Bharath, Srikala, Marimuthu, P, Varghese, Mathew
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
CLINICAL NEUROLOGY
GERIATRICS & GERONTOLOGY
HEALTH CARE SCIENCES & SERVICES
literacy and cognition
MEDICINE, GENERAL & INTERNAL
neuropsychological tests
NURSING
older adults
Original
PSYCHIATRY
PSYCHOLOGY
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Summary: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. To 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. This 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. Stepwise 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. Education 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.
ISSN:1980-5764
1980-5764
DOI:10.1590/S1980-57642014DN82000010