In a new study, researchers found How well eight-year-olds score on a test of thinking skills may be a predictor of how they will perform on tests of thinking and memory skills when they are 70 years old.
They also found that education level and socioeconomic status were also predictors of thinking and memory performance.
The research was conducted by a team from University College London and elsewhere.
The study examined 502 people all born during the same week in 1946 in Great Britain who took cognitive tests when they were eight years old.
Between the ages of 69 and 71, participants took thinking and memory tests again.
One test, similar to a test they completed as children, involved looking at various arrangements of geometric shapes and identifying the missing piece from five options.
Other tests evaluated skills like memory, attention, orientation, and language.
Participants had positron emission tomography (PET) scans to see if they had amyloid-beta plaques in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
They also had detailed brain magnetic resonance imaging scans (MRI).
The researchers found that childhood thinking skills were associated with scores on the cognitive tests taken more than 60 years later.
For example, someone whose cognitive performance was in the top 25% as a child, was likely to remain in the top 25% at age 70.
Even accounting for differences in childhood test scores, there was an additional effect of education.
For example, participants who completed a college degree scored around 16% higher than participants who left school before the age of 16.
Having a higher socioeconomic status also predicted slightly better cognitive performance at age 70, but the effect was very small.
For example, those who had worked in professional jobs tended to recall an average of 12 details from a short story, compared to 11 details for those who had worked in manual jobs.
Women performed better than men in the test of memory and thinking speed.
The team says that finding these predictors is important because it helps determine which aspects might be modifiable by education or lifestyle changes like exercise, diet or sleep, which may, in turn, slow the development of cognitive decline.
One author of the study is Jonathan M. Schott, MD, FRCP.
The study is published in Neurology.
Copyright © 2019 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
