Regular Research ArticlesLife Space and Risk of Alzheimer Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Cognitive Decline in Old Age
Section snippets
Participants
Participants are from two ongoing cohort studies, described later, approved by the institutional review board of Rush University Medical Center. These studies have a large common core of recruitment, data collection, and operational methods, which facilitates analyses of data from the combined cohorts. Both cohorts were treated as one analytical cohort.
The Rush Memory and Aging Project13 is a longitudinal clinical-pathological study of chronic conditions of aging. Older persons are recruited
Descriptive Statistics
The mean score on the life space measure was 0.61, (SD = 1.13); median (interquartile range) = 0 (0, 1). Eight percent of subjects reported that they had not been to an area beyond the yard, driveway, or parking lot of their home in the previous week (i.e., immediate home environment; life space score ≥ 3). In Spearman correlations, a more constricted life space was correlated with age (r = 0.19, n = 1,294, p <0.0001), education (r = −0.17, n = 1,294, p <0.0001), physical function (r = −0.27, n
DISCUSSION
We examined the association of life space with the risk of incident AD in almost 1,300 community-dwelling older persons. During up to 8 years of follow-up, a more constricted life space was associated with a substantially increased risk of AD, such that a person who had not been to an area beyond their home environment in the previous week was almost twice as likely to develop AD as a person who traveled out of town. This association remained consistent even after excluding persons who were
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The authors thank the participants and the staff of the Rush Memory and Aging Project, the Minority Aging Research Study, and the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center for this work, and they thank Sue Leurgans and Woojeong Bang for help with statistical programming. They thank Sue Leurgans for help with presentation of statistical findings as well.
Statistical analysis performed by B.D.J. with the assistance of Dr. Sue Leurgans, Senior Statistician at the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center, and Woojeong Bang, Supervising Statistician at the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center.
The study was supported by NIA grants R01AG17917, R01AG22018, R01AG034374, R01AG033678, and R01AG24480, the Illinois Department of Public Health, and the Robert C. Borwell Endowment Fund. The authors declare no conflict of interest. This study was presented as a poster at the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease, July 13, 2010, Honolulu, Hawaii.