Cognitive Function and Health Literacy Decline in a Cohort of Aging English Adults
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Low health literacy is common among aging patients and is a risk factor for morbidity and mortality. We aimed to describe health literacy decline during aging and to investigate the roles of cognitive function and decline in determining health literacy decline. METHODS: Data were from 5,256 non-cognitively impaired adults aged ≥ 52 years in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Health literacy was assessed using a four-item reading comprehension assessment of a fictitious medicine label, and cognitive function was assessed in a battery administered in-person at baseline (2004-2005) and at follow-up (2010-2011). RESULTS: Overall, 19.6% (1,032/5,256) of participants declined in health literacy score over the follow-up. Among adults aged ≥ 80 years at baseline, this proportion was 38.2% (102/267), compared to 14.8% (78/526) among adults aged 52-54 years (OR = 3.21; 95% CI: 2.26-4.57). Other sociodemographic predictors of health literacy decline were: male sex (OR = 1.20; 95% CI: 1.04-1.38), non-white ethnicity (OR = 2.42; 95% CI: 1.51-3.89), low educational attainment (OR = 1.58; 95% CI: 1.29-1.95 for no qualifications vs. degree education), and low occupational class (OR = 1.67; 95% CI: 1.39-2.01 for routine vs. managerial occupations). Higher baseline cognitive function scores protected against health literacy decline, while cognitive decline (yes vs. no) predicted decline in health literacy score (OR = 1.59; 95% CI: 1.35-1.87 for memory decline and OR = 1.56; 95% CI: 1.32-1.85 for executive function decline). CONCLUSIONS: Health literacy decline appeared to increase with age, and was associated with even subtle cognitive decline in older non-impaired adults. Striking social inequalities were evident, whereby men and those from minority and deprived backgrounds were particularly vulnerable to literacy decline. Health practitioners must be able to recognize limited health literacy to ensure that clinical demands match the literacy skills of diverse patients.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it