Primary Submission Category: Aging
The Effect of Education on Midlife Cognitive Health: The Mediating Role of Occupational Complexity
Authors: Jessie Himmelstern John Rob Warren Chandra Muller Eric Grodsky
Presenting Author: Jessie Himmelstern*
Over the last few decades an increasing number of individuals in the United States have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias (ADRD). As the population ages there is an expectation that the number of people with ADRD will increase three-fold (Langa et al 2017). Previous work has examined how social factors, including educational attainment and work, impact cognitive health later in life (Hyun et al. 2021; Lee et al. 2010; Lövdén et al. 2020). However, prior research has not carefully considered how the cognitive complexity of paid jobs might mediate the effects of education on ADRD risk. What is more, prior research has almost exclusively considered the quantity of schooling people complete. This ignores the complex experience of education in the United States; people with the same terminal degree may be very different with respect to educational opportunities, quality of schooling, peer attributes, and curricular exposures.
For this project, we use comprehensive measures of education from High School and Beyond—a large (n=~25,500), diverse, nationally-representative sample of Americans followed from high school in 1980 to age ~60 in 2021/2022—to explore the relationship between education and cognitive health. Beyond using more comprehensive measures of educational contexts, opportunities, and outcomes, we examine the mediating role of occupational complexity in this relationship.
Preliminary results indicate that educational attainment, parental income, and occupational complexity are significantly associated with cognitive health when controlling for demographic and educational measures. We also find that occupational complexity does mediate the relationship between education and cognitive health. However, once we include the comprehensive educational measures the amount of mediation is smaller than previous studies have indicated.