Early life environments and cognition in adulthood: New evidence using a semiparametric approach and quantile regression

Abstract

Theories and empirical evidence document the importance of early life environmental factors on later life cognition. A next question is how and in what dimension associations between early life environments and later life cognition vary. Using data from the UK Biobank in conjunction with time-place-specific infant mortality rates, we assessed heterogeneous and non-linear associations between early life conditions and later life cognition. We found that the association between the infant mortality rate and later life cognition increased once the UK achieved very low infant mortality rates, suggesting that additional decreases in infant mortality rates in an industrialized society continue to improve later life cognition. We also found that infant mortality rates have stronger effects at upper quantiles of the cognition distribution. This implies that adverse early life environments may have an important role for an early manifestation of cognitive aging.