Death, Dropout, and Longitudinal Measurements of Cognitive Change in Old Age

Patrick Rabbitt · Mary Lunn · Danny Wong

38 citations0/0 files storedThe Journals of Gerontology Series B

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Aging and Gerontology Research Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Research Cognitive Abilities and Testing

Abstract

During a 20-year longitudinal study of cognitive change in old age 2,342 of 5,842 participants died and 3,204 dropped out. To study cognitive change as death approaches, we grouped participants by survival, death, dropout, or dropout followed by death. Linear mixed-effects pattern-mixture models compared rates of cognitive change before death and dropout from four quadrennial administrations of tests of fluid intelligence, vocabulary, and verbal learning. After we took into account the significant effects of age, gender, demographics, and recruitment cohorts, we found that approach to death and dropout caused strikingly similar reductions in mean test scores and amounts of practice gains between successive quadrennial testing sessions. Participants who neither dropped out nor died showed significant but slight cognitive declines. These analyses illustrate how neglect of dropout miscalculates effects of death, of worsening health, and of all other factors affecting rates of cognitive change.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.

References

1988Speed of Information-Processing and Intelligence:1966Behavior, aging and the nervous system 1987Most chronic diseases are reported more frequently by individuals with fewer than 12 years of formal education in the age 18–64 United States population 2003Childhood IQ, Social Class, Deprivation, and Their Relationships with Mortality and Morbidity Risk in Later Life: Prospective Observational Study Linking the Scottish Mental Survey 1932 and the Midspan Studies 2004Practice and Drop-Out Effects During a 17-Year Longitudinal Study of Cognitive Aging 1979A Long-Term Longitudinal Study of Intellectual Ability of Older Adults: The Matter of Selective Subject Attrition 1967A study of the dropout rates in longitudinal research on aging and the prediction of death.1976Aging, Terminal Decline, and Terminal Drop

Cited by

2013The Wilson Effect: The Increase in Heritability of IQ With Age 2009First language attrition and reversion among older migrants 2007Unhappiness, health and cognitive ability in old age 2019Trajectories of functional health and its associations with information processing speed and subjective well-being: The role of age versus time to death.

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.