Tuesday, June 10, 2025
6/10/2025
Cultural variation in the impact of spousal depressive symptoms on Alzheimer's Disease and physical health - PROJECT SUMMARY Poor health and cognitive decline in older adulthood are significant public health challenges that profoundly impact individuals, their families, and society. In just the United States, current estimates of the healthcare costs of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are at $345 billion per year. This number will balloon to over $1 trillion per year by 2060 as the number of Americans living with AD will likely double to nearly 14 million. These stark numbers represent only a fraction of the world-wide burden of AD. It is crucial to identify potential risk factors to track the prevalence, emergence, and origins of AD and compromised cognitive health across the second half of life. One particular risk factor—depressive symptoms—has been identified as a modifiable risk factor that robustly predicts worse health and cognition, doubling the likelihood of both early mortality and the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Depressive symptoms are also pervasive risk factors—the depressive symptoms of others, such as romantic partners, put individuals at risk for compromised health. Although the health consequences of depressive symptoms are well documented, research to date has been limited to individuals from so-called WEIRD countries (i.e., predominantly White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and especially from North America. The current project aims to redress this gap by leveraging individual and dyadic data from multiple panel studies within the “International Sister Studies” harmonized by USC Gateway to Global Aging Data Center. The author team will examine the predictive influence of depressive symptoms on health and cognition within and across individuals among over 351,161 middle-aged and older adults (115,549 couples) from 39 different countries followed longitudinally across the latter half of life. The aggregation of these data sets will represent the most comprehensive and culturally diverse study characterizing the effects of depressive symptoms on health and cognition ever conducted. These efforts contextualize psychosocial determinants of health in a culturally diverse framework by leveraging multiple NIH-funded population-based panel studies. Our results will have positive translational impact by (a) identifying protective factors mitigating risk for poor health and cognition and (b) examining depressive symptoms as a viable target to improve the health and cognition of older adults worldwide.
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