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.
