Aging
Estimating the effect of childhood adversity on mid- and late-life memory decline in a nationally representative sample Eleanor Hayes-Larson* Eleanor Hayes-Larson Taylor M Mobley Karestan C Koenen
Introduction: Evidence on the relationship between childhood adversity and cognitive decline is inconsistent. We aimed to estimate the effect of childhood adversity on mid- and late-life memory decline in a national population-based sample.
Methods: We used data from Health and Retirement Study participants aged 50+ with complete exposure and covariate data (n=6,208). Childhood adversity factor z-scores were constructed with confirmatory factor analysis of 6 self-reported items: trouble with the police, parental drug or alcohol problems, parental abuse, lived in an orphanage, lived in a foster home, and parental separation/divorce. Imputed memory scores (Wu et al., z-scored to baseline sample) were defined biennially 1995-2020 using direct and proxy assessments. We estimated associations between childhood adversity and baseline memory function and memory decline using nested multivariate linear mixed effect models with random intercepts adjusted for study time (in decades) as the timescale, practice effects, confounders (Model 1: practice effect, baseline age; Model 2: Model 1 + sex/gender, race/ethnicity, parental education, Southern US birth; Model 3: Model 2 + childhood financial capital), and interactions between study time and childhood adversity factor scores and study time and confounders.
Results: The analytic sample was 57% female and 85% non-Hispanic White. Childhood adversity item prevalence ranged from 1.5% (lived in a foster home) to 16% (parental drug or alcohol problems). In the fully-adjusted model (Model 3), childhood adversity was associated with lower baseline memory function (beta=-0.02, 95% CI: -0.04, 0.00) but slower memory decline (beta=0.02, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.03).
Conclusions: Consistent with some existing literature, childhood adversity was associated with lower baseline memory function but slower memory decline; resilience mechanisms and selective survival may contribute to these findings and inconsistencies in the larger literature.
