Older Adult Alcohol Use in Relation to Cognition: An Exploratory Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Objectives: Substance use in the older adult population is expected to dramatically increase over the next decade as baby-boomers age. Of marked concern, are the cognitive effects of alcohol use and how these may manifest differently among older compared to younger adults. The present study evaluated the relationship of alcohol use among older adults to working memory and attention by assessing cognitive task performance on the Operation Span (OSPAN) and Simon tasks. Methods: Participants included 94 community dwelling older adults between the ages of 55 and 85 (females = 54), predominately Caucasian and well educated, recruited from southeastern US. Results: Approximately 89% of the sample reported drinking at least once in the past 90 days, and 29.0% reported drinking every day in the past 90. Frequency of drinking did not correlate with task performance on any of the cognitive measures. Alcohol use increased with age in this sample, contrary to prior findings. Females scored higher than males on both measures of the OSPAN. Also, participants reported more alcohol-related negative consequences over the lifetime, as their drinking frequency increased. Conclusions: Further research is required to determine under what circumstances alcohol may produce a cognitive decrement. Clinical and research implications are discussed. Objectifs: La consommation de substances chez les adultes plus âgés devrait augmenter considérablement au cours de la prochaine décennie à mesure que les baby-boomers vieilliront. Les effets cognitifs de la consommation d’alcool et la façon dont ils peuvent se manifester différemment chez les adultes plus âgés sont particulièrement préoccupants. La présente étude a évalué la relation entre la consommation d’alcool chez les personnes âgées et la mémoire de travail et l’attention en évaluant la performance des tâches cognitives sur les tâches OSPAN et Simon. Méthodes: Les participants comprenaient 94 adultes âgés de 55 à 85 ans vivant dans la communauté (femmes = 54), principalement de race blanche et bien éduqués, recrutés dans le sud-est des États-Unis. Résultats: Environ 89% de l’échantillon ont déclaré avoir bu au moins une fois au cours des 90 derniers jours, et 29,0% ont déclaré avoir bu chaque jour au cours des 90 derniers. La consommation d’alcool augmentait avec l’âge dans cet échantillon, contrairement aux résultats antérieurs. Les femmes ont obtenu des scores plus élevés que les hommes sur les deux mesures de l’OSPAN. De plus, les participants ont signalé plus de conséquences négatives liées à l’alcool au cours de leur vie si leur fréquence de consommation augmentait. Conclusions: Des recherches supplémentaires sont nécessaires pour déterminer dans quelles circonstances l’alcool peut entraîner une diminution cognitive. Les implications cliniques et de recherche sont discutées.
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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".