Late life anxiety is associated with decreased memory and executive functioning in community dwelling older adults
Highlights
► We examine relationships between anxiety and memory and executive functioning among older adults. ► Anxiety predicted lower ability to learn new information. ► Anxiety predicted lower ability to organize information to be learned. ► Anxiety predicted decreased categorization. ► Anxiety relates to ability to learn new information, set-switching, and categorizing information.
Section snippets
Participants
A total of 120 community dwelling older adults (60 years old and older) participated in this study. They were recruited through a registry of older adults who have expressed interest in participating in research. They were contacted via phone call and invited to participate. Participants were eligible to participate if they were 60 years old or older and could arrange their own transportation to the testing center. Demographics of the sample are provided in Table 1.
Anxiety
Geriatric Anxiety Scale (GAS).
Results
Mean scores on the GAS, GDS, and CMI, and mean standard scores on the CVLT-II and D–KEFS measures are presented in Table 1. The mean GAS total score of 12.6 in this sample is similar to the average score in the normative sample (Segal et al., 2010) of community-dwelling older adults and represents relatively mild levels of anxiety with significant variation (range = 0–42). GAS and GDS total scores were uncorrelated with age or education. Pearson correlations between the primary measures of this
Discussion
This study examined the relationships among anxiety and depression symptoms, memory, and executive functioning in a large sample of community-dwelling older adults. We found that anxiety symptoms, particularly affective symptoms of anxiety, were related to decreased performance on an immediate verbal memory recall test, and that this relationship was explained by semantic clustering ability. Additionally, anxiety symptoms were related to lowered performance on several tests of executive
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