Cognitive associations of benzodiazepine use in older adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Use of prescription medications for various conditions is highly prevalent in older adults, often leading to the use of multiple medications. The resulting polypharmacy is widely recognized as a risk factor for many negative outcomes, but less is known about the risks of specific types of medication upon cognitive functions. Benzodiazepines are commonly prescribed for the treatment of anxiety and insomnia, among other conditions. While dependency with continued use has been the subject of much concern over this type of medication, other literature has suggested an increased risk of cognitive impairment with chronic use of benzodiazepines. The nature of the cognitive changes and the domains of cognitive function most likely to be affected have differed across various studies. Here we describe the associations between measures of various domains of cognitive functioning and benzodiazepine use in 2879 older Canadian adults from the Canadian Study of Health and Aging (CSHA; 64.3% female, mean age 81.0 years, SD=7.44). These people underwent a comprehensive medical and psychosocial evaluation that included a record of medications used, in addition to a complete personal and medical history. The CSHA was a community-based epidemiological study of the prevalence of dementia and its associated risk factors in over 10,000 Canadians. Benzodiazepines were classified according to their half-life: short (under 12 hours), medium (12 to 40 hours) or long half-life (over 40 hours); 35 elderly people were excluded since they were taking more than one class of benzodiazepine. A comprehensive neuropsychological battery that assessed the major domains of cognitive functioning was administered to all participants who completed the CSHA clinical assessment. Neuropsychological test scores for the domains of short- and long-term memory, abstract reasoning, judgement, visuoconstruction, and language formed were the primary independent variables, while gender, age, and years of education were used as covariates in logistic regression models predicting use of each class of drug. Education was not a significant covariate for any analysis. Gender proved to be a significant covariate in the case of the medium-half life drugs, but not for the other two classes. Age was a significant covariate for the majority of test scores for the short and long half-life drugs. After controlling for the covariates, the results showed a broader range of cognitive impairments with the use of short half-life benzodiazepines than with the medium half-life or the long half-life benzodiazepine compounds. Six cognitive measures, assessing abstract reasoning and comprehension, verbal fluency, verbal memory, and visuoconstruction skills (BlockDesign), showed poorer performance among those who used short half-life benzodiazepines, two measures, those of abstract reasoning and comprehension, showed impaired performance by those using medium half-life benzodiazepines, and three measures, for abstract reasoning, verbal memory, and visuoconstruction skills, showed lower performance by those taking long halflife benzodiazepines. Wechsler Similarities, the measure of abstract reasoning, was the only showing significant differences common across all three drug class models. Results are discussed in terms of both the relative extent of lower neuropsychological test scores and the context of increasing evidence of impaired functioning associated with benzodiazepine use.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".