Is the Long-Term Use of Benzodiazepines Associated With Worse Cognition Performance in Highly Educated Older Adults?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Benzodiazepines (BZD) are common medications for sedative, hypnotic, and anxiolytic that are especially prevalent in older adults. Previous studies have shown that BZD use could impair users’ cognition, significantly affecting their quality of life. Past research has shown that higher education might play a protective role in the process of cognitive decline. Very few studies had examined the cognitive effects of benzodiazepines (BZD) on highly educated older adults. The study aimed to explore how cognitive functions would be affected by benzodiazepines among highly educated older adults. Method: 140 older adults with an average education period of 14.8 years were included in this study. The subjects were divided into three separate groups, the long-term BZD users (≥180 days), short-term BZD users (<180 days), and non-users. Demographics and cognitive assessments for the three groups were analyzed using an ANOVA, chi-squared, and ANCOVA. To examine the association between BZD use and cognition a multiple linear aggression approach was used. Result: All three groups were significantly different from each other when looking at executive functioning in the Trail Making Test B (TMT-B). Compared to the control group, short-term BZD users showed significant defects in TMT-B time (p = 0.002) and TMT-B errors (p < 0.001); long-term BZD users showed significant defect on TMT-B time (p = 0.041). Compared to short-term BZD users, long-term BZD users showed significant merit on TMT-B errors (p=0.001). No significant differences were found in other cognitive tasks that reflected general cognition, verbal memory, language fluency, and visual memory. After adjusting for demographic, increased BZD use over time was positively associated with scores for the revised Brief Visuospatial Memory Test (r = 0.377, p = 0.012) Conclusion: BZD use significantly affects executive functioning in highly educated older adults. However, the duration of BZD use may not result in increased cognitive deficits in highly educated older adults.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".