A study from the Yale School of Public Health found that older people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a common type of memory loss, were 30% more likely to regain normal cognition if had adopted positive beliefs about aging from their culture, compared to those who had adopted negative beliefs.
The researchers also found that these positive beliefs also allowed participants to regain their cognition up to two years sooner than those with negative age beliefs. This cognitive recovery advantage was found regardless of the initial severity of mild cognitive impairment.
“Most people assume there is no recovery from mild cognitive impairment, but in fact half of those who have it recover. Little is known about why some recover and others don’t. That’s why we looked at positive beliefs about age, to see if they would help give an answer,” said Becca Levy, professor of public health and psychology and lead author of the study.
Levy predicted that positive age beliefs could play an important role in cognitive recovery because his previous experimental studies with older people found that positive age beliefs reduced stress caused by cognitive challenges, increased self-confidence about cognition, and increased self-confidence about cognition. improved cognitive performance.
The new study is the first to find evidence that a culture-based factor — positive beliefs about age — contributes to recovery from mild cognitive impairment. The study appeared in JAMA Open Network. Martin Slade, a biostatistician and professor of internal medicine at Yale, is a co-author of the study.
Older people in the positive age belief group who began the study with normal cognition were less likely to develop MCI in the next 12 years than those in the negative age belief group, regardless of their starting age and physical health.
The National Institute on Aging funded this study. It included 1,716 participants aged 65 or older who were drawn from the Health and Retirement Study, a national longitudinal study.
“Our previous research has shown that age beliefs can be changed; therefore, interventions on age beliefs at the individual and societal levels could increase the number of people who experience cognitive recovery,” Levy said.