Abstract
Previous studies of the association between parity and long-term cognitive changes have primarily focused on women and have shown conflicting results. We investigated this association by analyzing data collected on 303,196 subjects from the UK Biobank. We found that in both females and males, having offspring was associated with a faster response time and fewer mistakes made in the visual memory task. Subjects with two or three children had the largest differences relative to those who were childless, with greater effects observed in men. We further analyzed the association between parity and relative brain age (n = 13,584), a brain image-based biomarker indicating how old one’s brain structure appears relative to peers. We found that in both sexes, subjects with two or three offspring had significantly reduced brain age compared to those without offspring, corroborating our cognitive function results. Our findings suggest that lifestyle factors accompanying having offspring, rather than the physical process of pregnancy experienced only by females, contribute to these associations and underscore the importance of studying such factors, particularly in the context of sex.
Highlights
Previous studies of the association between parity and long-term cognitive changes have primarily focused on women and have shown conflicting results
We investigated the association between parity and cognitive function in both sexes using UK Biobank data, where data on visual memory, response time, demographic, and lifestyle information were collected on over 300,000 subjects of European ancestry
We studied the association of number of offspring with response time, visual memory, and brain imaging derived relative brain age (RBA) in the UK Biobank cohort
Summary
Previous studies of the association between parity and long-term cognitive changes have primarily focused on women and have shown conflicting results We investigated this association by analyzing data collected on 303,196 subjects from the UK Biobank. A recent study of approximately 10,000 male and female subjects found an association between the number of offspring and cognitive function in later life in both sexes, including memory and executive function, and suggested that socioeconomic status largely accounted for the association[7]. We investigated the association between parity and cognitive function in both sexes using UK Biobank data, where data on visual memory, response time, demographic, and lifestyle information were collected on over 300,000 subjects of European ancestry. We derived relative brain age (RBA) metric, a biomarker indicating the aging level of a person’s brain relative to peers, and studied how parity is associated with RBA using brain imaging data of over 13,000 subjects
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