Abstract
As one ages, the number of impeding life events and health complications may increase, and affect also one's cognitive performance. The goal of our study was to find about an associa-tion of the level of negative life factors with cognitive performance in our sample, and to construct a scale reflecting that level.
Methods: The sample comprised 324 healthy cognitively normal persons 60-74 years old without serious neurological or psychiatric disorder, who were for at least 2 years retired and without a paid job. They were asked about seven factors that made up the Impedi-ments-7 scale - subjective health rating (1-5); current pain (Visual Analogue Scale, 1-10); sleep disturbances (0-13); depressive symptoms (0-15) and regular use of psychopharmacs (0-3); negative life events in the past 12 months (0-6); worries about their economic situation (1-5); and problems to live off of their monthly income (1-6).
The scores were transformed to Likert-like scale (1-5), with 1 meaning absence of the symptom/problem. Neuropsycholog-ical battery included Story, Boston Naming Test-15, Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning test (Trial 1), Prague Stroop Test, Verbal Fluency - Animals, Trail Making Test A and B, Digit Symbol Substitution test, Simple Reaction Time and Go-No Go.
Reliability of the Impediments-7 scale was calculated with McDonald's coefficient omega. Associations with other variables (cogni-tive performance, demographic data) were analyzed with Pearson's correlation coefficient, Univariate analysis or linear regression analysis.
Results/Discussion: The reliability of the 7-item scale was 0.45. The mean total score was 16.24 (SD = 3.25), ranging from 10 to 26 points while nobody scored the maximum (35 points).
To increase the reliability of the scale, we omitted three items (negative life events in the past 12 months; worries about economic situation and problems to live off of monthly income), that correlated only weakly with the others. The total score of the 4-item scale could possibly range 4-28.
Coefficient omega then grew to 0.67. The mean scores were 8.53 (SD = 2.68), range 4 to 18.
Nobody scored the maximum, but 6 persons scored the minimum. In either Impediments scale, 7- or 4-item, we found no statistically important differences based on gender or education.
The total scores in either variant of the impediments scale did not correlate with performance in administered cognitive tests. Our results show, that certain level of life impeding factors is common.
In our sample, they had not significant effect on cognitive performance. Nevertheless, we need to bear in mind that our sample included generally healthy older population who did not reach the ex-treme scores, which could affect the performance.
The role of individual impeding factors as moderators of cognition needs further investigation.