Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cognitive and brain reserve refer to individual differences that allow some people to better withstand brain pathology than others. Although early life stress has been recognized as a risk factor for low reserve in late life, no research yet has studied this across midlife.
OBJECTIVE: To examine the associations of life stress with brain and cognitive reserve in midlife.
METHODS: We included 1,232 middle-aged women who participated in the ORACLE Study between 2002-2006). Life stress was calculated as the shared variance of four cumulative stress domains, created from items measured between pregnancy and 10 years after childbirth. Brain reserve was defined as healthy-appearing brain volume measured with MRI; cognitive reserve as better cognitive functioning than expected based on age, education, and brain MRI measures, using structural equation modelling.
RESULTS: More life stress was associated with lower brain (standardized adjusted difference: -0.18 [95% CI 0.25,-0.12]) and cognitive reserve (-0.19 [-0.28,-0.10]). Although, effect sizes were typically smaller, cumulative stress domains were also associated with brain reserve (life events: -0.10 [-0.16,-0.04]; contextual stress: -0.13 [-0.19,-0.07]; parenting-related stress: -0.13[-0.19,-0.07]; interpersonal stress: -0.10 [-0.16,-0.04]) and cognitive reserve (life events: -0.18 [-0.25,-0.11]; contextual stress: -0.15 [-0.10,-0.02]; parenting-related stress: -0.10 [-0.18,-0.03]; interpersonal stress not significant).
CONCLUSION: Women who experience more life stress in midlife were found to have lower reserve. Effects were primarily driven by shared variance across cumulative stress domains, suggesting that focusing on single domains may underestimate effects. The effect of life stress on lower reserve may make women with stress more prone to neurodegenerative disease later in life than women without stress.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 97-106 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD |
| Volume | 93 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 14 Mar 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2 May 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The general design of The Generation R Study is funded by the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, ZonMw, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, and is conducted by the Erasmus Medical Center in close collaboration with the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the Stichting Trombosedienst & Artsenlaboratorium Rijnmond (STAR-MDC), Rotterdam. This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (project: ORACLE, grant agreement No 678543). The work of CC has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement (project: EarlyCause, grant agreement No 848158).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 - The authors. Published by IOS Press.
