Conceptualizing the relationship between parental education and own cognition in the Kaiser Healthy Aging and Diverse Life Experiences (KHANDLE) study

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundFew studies have considered how parental education influences late‐life cognition; those that have often focus on maternal and not paternal influences or as part of a broader SES index, which does not allow us to understand the functional form of the relationship between parental education and cognition. We assessed whether mother’s education dichotomized at 8th grade, a commonly used cutoff among similarly aged older adults to our sample, sufficiently captured effects of parental education by systematically evaluating conceptualizations of parental education.MethodsKaiser Healthy Aging and Diverse Life Experiences (KHANDLE) study baseline participants, aged 65 years plus (n=1,633), self‐reported own and parents’ education at baseline. Parental education was operationalized separately as (1) mother’s only, (2) father’s only, (3) mother and father together; each operationalization was considered as categorical (missing, <=8th grade, incomplete high school, high school diploma, postsecondary education), as >8th grade (with missingness indicator and with missing included in “low”), and as high school completion (with and without missingness indicator). Parental (4) concordance (both high, high mother, high father, both low), (5) highest parental level, and (6) lowest parental level were also evaluated. Verbal episodic memory (VEM), semantic memory (SEM), and executive functioning (EF) from the Spanish and English Neuropsychological Assessment Scales (SENAS) were considered separately in covariate‐adjusted linear models. The lowest Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) model was considered to provide the best fit.ResultsAcross all parental education operationalizations, 8th grade cut‐offs performed best; categorical (5‐level) parent education performed the worst. Semantic memory was best predicted by the referent measure of mother’s education >8th (B̂: 0.33; 95% CI: 0.25, 0.42); however verbal memory was best predicted by mother’s education >8th grade (B̂: 0.14; 95% CI: 0.03, 0.24) plus missing indicator (B̂: ‐0.24; 95% CI: ‐0.37, ‐0.10) and executive function by both mother’s (B̂: 0.22; 95% CI: 0.12, 0.31) and father’s (B̂: 0.18; 95% CI: 0.09, 0.28) >8th together.ConclusionThe preferable performance of parental education as >8th grade likely reflects historical education trends when KHANDLE participants’ parents were educated; whether preference for dichotomized measures over full categories reflects uncertainties in recall of parental education remains unclear.