Abstract

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Background
Keywords
Findings
Authors

Background

With data from the 2009 Canadian Community Health Survey—Healthy Aging Cognition Module, five cognitive functioning categories based on normative values that adjust for age, sex and education were created.  The two lowest categories were combined to identify seniors (65 or older) without Alzheimer's disease or dementia living in private households, who had low scores on four cognitive tasks:  first recall, second recall, semantic fluency, and processing speed.  Low income, not living with a spouse or partner, and diabetes were associated with low scores on each task.  Heart disease, impairment in instrumental and daily activities, receiving home care, social participation, loneliness, and self-perceived general and mental health were also associated with low cognitive performance, although the associations differed by cognitive task

Keywords

Accidental falls, activities of daily living, aging, cognition disorders, cross-sectional studies, health surveys, home care services, loneliness, memory disorders, mental recall, social alienation

Findings

Cognition is "the mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgement." Some decrease in cognition is expected at older ages, but the decline is not uniform across all cognitive tasks or for all individuals. Impaired cognition can have health consequences, such as fi rst stroke, falls, and institutionalization. It may reduce an individual's ability to communicate pain to health care providers, carry out instrumental activities of daily living, and cope with chronic disease symptoms, perform selfcare and adhere to medication instructions. [Full Text]

Authors

Heather Gilmour (613-951-2114, Heather.Gilmour@statcan.gc.ca) is with the Health Analysis at Statistics Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0T6.