Mobility and Upright Posture Are Associated with Different Aspects of Cognition in Older Adults.

Rajal G Cohen,Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe,Anita N Vasavada,Michelle M Wiest

doi:10.3389/fnagi.2016.00257

Rajal G Cohen, Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2016.00257

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Abstract

Objectives: Aging is associated with cognitive decline, including visuomotor and memory concerns, and with motor system changes, including gait slowing and stooped posture. We investigated the associations of visuomotor performance and episodic memory with motor system characteristics in healthy older adults.Methods: Neurologically healthy older adults (N = 160, aged 50–89) completed a battery of cognitive and motor tasks. Cognitive variables were grouped by principal components analysis (PCA) into two components: visuomotor performance and verbal episodic memory. Our primary predictor variables were two aspects of motor function: timed-up-and-go (TUG) speed and neck angle. Additional predictor variables included demographic factors (age, sex and education) and indicators of physical fitness (body mass index/BMI and grip strength). All seven predictor variables were entered stepwise into a multiple regression model for each cognitive component.Results: Poor visuomotor performance was best predicted by a combination of advanced age, high BMI and slow TUG, whereas poor verbal memory performance was best predicted by a combination of advanced age, male sex, low education and acute neck angle.Conclusions: Upright posture and mobility were associated with different cognitive processes, suggesting different underlying neural mechanisms. These results provide the first evidence for a link between postural alignment and cognitive functioning in healthy older adults. Possible causal relationships are discussed.

Highlights

Understanding the causes and correlates of age-related cognitive decline is important for developing methods to prevent and reverse that decline
We investigated possible associations of stooped posture with both visuomotor performance and verbal episodic memory
principal components analysis (PCA) indicated that the three visuomotor tasks load strongly on the first component and the three verbal memory tasks load strongly

Summary

Introduction

Understanding the causes and correlates of age-related cognitive decline is important for developing methods to prevent and reverse that decline. Visuomotor performance involves the ability to synchronize visual information with physical movement of the body (Shumway-Cook and Woollacott, 2001) This constellation of skills is crucial for many everyday functions, such as navigating in a busy environment. In a study using the digit-symbol substitution task young subjects (aged 18–40) completed 50% more items than older subjects (aged 60–88) within a 90 s time frame (Henry and Phillips, 2006). Performance on both backward and forward spatial span tasks shows marked decline with age, and spatial span declines more sharply than digit span (Myerson et al, 2003). Poor performance on a design fluency task has been associated with pathological cognitive aging, when broadly defined (Chi et al, 2012)

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