Helping Behaviors and Cognitive Functioning in Later Life: Linkages with Genetic Risks for Alzheimer's Disease and Disadvantaged Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status - Project Summary There is an urgent need to identify modifiable risk factors and intervention approaches that would help to prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). In this regard, several researchers propose that prosocial engagement via helping others should be considered a public health intervention for tackling the AD epidemic. This perspective is based on the accumulated evidence demonstrating how formal volunteering confers a wide range of health benefits for the volunteer, in part through influencing neurobiological systems that also influence AD risk. Although recent reviews indicate inconclusive evidence, a small but growing body of correlational evidence for the link between volunteering and cognitive outcomes is corroborated by findings from randomized control trials, such as the Baltimore Experience Corps. However, earlier studies on prosocial helping behaviors in later life mostly focused on formal volunteering, while little is known about the cognitive benefits of informal helping given directly to non-household individuals in the community, which may be more relevant for African and Hispanic Americans with a richer tradition of informally serving their communities. The overarching goal of the project is to uncover robust evidence linking two forms of helping behaviors (i.e., formal volunteering, and informal helping) and better cognitive functioning so as to establish prosocial engagement as a health behavior that could reduce the risk or delay the onset of AD. Taking advantage of the rich longitudinal data from the NIA-funded Health and Retirement Study (1998-2020), we address the following key aims. First, we identify the extent to which helping behaviors promote higher levels of cognitive functioning and slower cognitive decline while paying close attention to potential racial-ethnic differences for the link between the type of helping and cognitive outcomes. We employ the recently-proposed asymmetric modeling approach to accurately estimate the within-person effects of transitioning into (and out of) helping behaviors. Subsequently, we disentangle rapid cognitive decline driven by genetic risk factors for developing AD from normal, age-related changes in cognitive functioning and identify the dose-response of helping needed to alleviate cognitive decline accelerated by high genetic AD risk. Finally, we situate the helping- cognition nexus within the neighborhood context in which helping behaviors often take place and investigate the extent to which helping others buffers detrimental effects of disadvantaged and/or deteriorating neighborhood socioeconomic status, assessed with Census-tract level data. The research team includes a new investigator and four consultants with expertise covering all facets of the proposed project, and thus the team is well-suited to successfully address the innovative set of project aims. The project is expected to yield high reward outcomes not only in terms of contributing to the scientific literature but also for developing strategies for effective, evidence-driven community-based AD intervention programs, an urgent priority of NIA.
