Abstract
Successful aging depends upon several internal and external factors that influence the overall aging process. Objective and subjective socioeconomic status emerge as potential psychosocial factors in the ethiopathophysiology of aging-related disorders. Presumably, low socioeconomic status can act as a psychosocial stressor that can affect humans’ physiology via psychoneuroendocrine mechanisms, that may, in turn, affect the brain physiology. In resting-state electroencephalography (EEG), excess theta and delta activity has been related to cognitive decline and dementia. The main aim of this study was to analyze the effect of objective and subjective socioeconomic status (SES) on cognition and brain electrical activity through EEG measures. The present research constitutes a cross-sectional study with thirty healthy older adults (61–82 years old) separated into two clusters: high socioeconomic (HS) and low socioeconomic (LS) status; they were evaluated and compared in cognitive terms using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV). An EEG at rest was recorded to measure brain activity and, as an indicator of long-term stress exposure, hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) were measured. Our results show that lower SES is related to a worse performance in working memory tasks (p = 0.009), higher delta (p = 0.002) and theta power (p = 0.039), and lower alpha activity (p = 0.028). However, it seems that SES does not significantly affect HCC in this population of healthy older adults. The effects of SES on long-term cortisol exposure, brain electrical activity, and cognitive functions in healthy older people emphasize the role of psychosocial factors in aging from an integrative perspective that will allow us to implement better prevention programs to target cognitive decline in adults.
Highlights
It is well known that life expectancy is increasing progressively, a phenomenon that is called population aging
The analyses revealed no main differences between clusters in age
Significant differences between clusters were found in objective socioeconomic status (AMAI), the high socioeconomic (HS) cluster showed higher scores than the low Socioeconomic status (LS) cluster
Summary
It is well known that life expectancy is increasing progressively, a phenomenon that is called population aging. The incidence of neurocognitive disorders, as well as other age-related diseases, is increasing around the world. It is becoming a challenge for researchers to elucidate the factors involved in the development of cognitive decline. The most important goal in the detection of cognitive decline is to find signs of abnormalities prior to the establishment of cognitive deterioration. In this line, Prichep et al (2006) [2] found—in a sample of healthy older adults—that the higher the theta power and the lower the mean frequency, the more probable it was to develop cognitive decline after
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