Healthy lifestyle and cognitive decline in middle-aged and older adults residing in 14 European countries

Mikaela Bloomberg*, Graciela Muniz-Terrera, Laura Brocklebank, Andrew Steptoe

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Studies examining lifestyle and cognitive decline often use healthy lifestyle indices, making it difficult to understand implications for interventions. We examined associations of 16 lifestyles with cognitive decline. Data from 32,033 cognitively-healthy adults aged 50-104 years participating in prospective cohort studies of aging from 14 European countries were used to examine associations of lifestyle with memory and fluency decline over 10 years. The reference lifestyle comprised not smoking, no-to-moderate alcohol consumption, weekly moderate-plus-vigorous physical activity, and weekly social contact. We found that memory and fluency decline was generally similar for non-smoking lifestyles. By contrast, memory scores declined up to 0.17 standard deviations (95% confidence interval= 0.08 - 0.27) and fluency scores up to 0.16 standard deviations (0.07 - 0.25) more over 10 years for those reporting smoking lifestyles compared with the reference lifestyle. We thus show that differences in cognitive decline between lifestyles were primarily dependent on smoking status.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)5003
JournalNature Communications
Volume15
Issue number1
Early online date27 Jun 2024
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 27 Jun 2024

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Humans
  • Middle Aged
  • Europe/epidemiology
  • Aged
  • Male
  • Female
  • Cognitive Dysfunction/epidemiology
  • Healthy Lifestyle
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Smoking/epidemiology
  • Prospective Studies
  • Alcohol Drinking/epidemiology
  • Exercise
  • Memory/physiology
  • Aging/physiology
  • Cognition/physiology
  • Life Style

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