Lifetime stress exposure, cognition, and psychiatric wellbeing in women

Abstract

Objectives:Although life stress has been associated with worse cognitive and psychiatric functioning, few studies on this topic have examined these associations in older adults and no studies to date have assessed lifetime stress exposure in this context.

Method:To address this important issue, we investigated associations between lifetime stress exposure, cognition, and psychiatric wellbeing in 44 women aged 60 and older who completed a comprehensive lifetime stress exposure inventory, two memory tasks, and a complete psychiatric assessment.

Results:As hypothesized, greater acute and chronic lifetime stress exposure were both related to poorer psychiatric functioning and more somatic health complaints. Greater lifetime stress exposure was also associated with poorer subjective cognition as indicated by memory and thought problems but not objective indices of memory function.

Conclusion:Screening for high life stress exposure may therefore help identify older women at increased risk of experiencing negative psychiatric and cognitive outcomes.

Keywords:

• Aging
• stress
• women
• psychiatric well-being
• cognition

Acknowledgements

Julie Dumas, Ph. D. was supported by grants NIH AG050716, AG062105, AG066159. George M. Slavich, Ph.D. was supported by a Society in Science—Branco Weiss Fellowship, NARSAD Young Investigator Grant #23958 from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and National Institutes of Health grant K08 MH103443.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the authors.