Aging
Association of heavy vs moderate alcohol use in early or middle adulthood with mid- and late-life memory: a pooled-cohort analysis Peter T. Buto* Peter Buto Buto Buto Buto Buto Buto Buto Buto Buto Department of Epidemiology, Boston University, School of Public Health
Few cohorts have the follow-up time to estimate the association of early-adult heavy alcohol use with later life cognitive decline.
We pooled data from National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 study (NLSY, n=7540, ages 14-22 at enrollment) and Health and Retirement Study (HRS age 50-56 at enrollment 1998 on, n=13,090). Alcohol use was self-reported in early adulthood (ages 23-31 in NLSY) and at HRS enrollment (non-drinking, some drinking [≤7 drinks/week for women; ≤14 for men; no heavy episodic drinking], or heavy drinking). Memory was assessed up to twice in NLSY at age 48+ and up to 10 times in HRS at age 50+ as the sum of immediate and delayed word recall scores. We estimated associations between heavy drinking with average memory level and change within each cohort using covariate-adjusted linear mixed models. To leverage the advantages of both datasets, we then generated a synthetic life course cohort, matching 7,054 HRS participants to 4,908 NLSY participants based on 10 variables posited to confound/mediate the association between early adult alcohol use and late-life memory. We then estimated the association between early adult alcohol measures from NLSY with the repeated late life memory measures in the synthetic cohort.
In NLSY, heavy drinking at age 23-31 was associated with lower average memory scores (β=-0.60 [95% CI: -0.78,-0.41]) and faster declines in memory scores (-0.31 per decade [-0.57,-0.06]). In HRS, middle age heavy alcohol use (average age 53.1) was associated with lower average memory (-0.66 [-0.81,-0.52]) and slightly faster decline (-0.11 per decade [-0.26,0.03]). In the synthetic cohort, heavy alcohol use at age 23-27 was associated with lower memory score at age 50+ (-0.19 [-0.37,-0.02]) and with faster decline (0.03 per decade [-0.23,0.29]).
In the synthetic cohort, heavy alcohol consumption in early adulthood was associated with worse memory in later life while estimates for memory change were null.
