Abstract
Background
Burden of dementia is expected to substantially increase. Early dementia is underdiagnosed in primary care. Given the benefits of active management of dementia, earlier detection ...in primary care is imperative. The aim of this study was to understand primary care provider (PCP) perceptions of implementing a cognitive assessment toolkit in primary care.
Methods
PCPs in a large health system in the US were recruited to a qualitative study utilizing semi-structured interviews. Interviews captured provider perceptions of options for implementing a cognitive assessment toolkit derived from the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) KAER (Kickstart, Assess, Evaluate, Refer) toolkit, including a workflow and adapted clinical tools. A content analysis approach distinguished themes and exemplary quotes.
Results
Ten PCPs were interviewed. They found the toolkit useful, felt the term Kickstart was not specific to dementia care, and stressed that addressing cognitive evaluation would need to be easy to implement in a clinical workflow. Finally, providers knew many resources for referral but were unsure how to help patients navigate options.
Conclusions
Providers stressed simplicity, ease, and efficiency for implementation of a cognitive assessment toolkit. Incorporating these findings into the development of clinical tools and workflows may increase cognitive evaluations conducted by PCPs.
We sought to determine whether in the absence of clinical stroke, people with atrial fibrillation experience faster cognitive decline than people without atrial fibrillation.
We conducted a ...longitudinal analysis in the Cardiovascular Health Study, a community-based study of 5,888 men and women aged 65 years and older, enrolled in 1989/1990 or 1992/1993. Participants did not have atrial fibrillation or a history of stroke at baseline. Participants were censored when they experienced incident clinical stroke. Incident atrial fibrillation was identified by hospital discharge diagnosis codes and annual study ECGs. The main outcome was rate of decline in mean scores on the 100-point Modified Mini-Mental State Examination (3MSE), administered annually up to 9 times.
Analyses included 5,150 participants, of whom 552 (10.7%) developed incident atrial fibrillation during a mean of 7 years of follow-up. Mean 3MSE scores declined faster after incident atrial fibrillation compared with no prior atrial fibrillation. For example, the predicted 5-year decline in mean 3MSE score from age 80 to age 85 was -6.4 points (95% confidence interval CI: -7.0, -5.9) for participants without a history of atrial fibrillation, but was -10.3 points (95% CI: -11.8, -8.9) for participants experiencing incident atrial fibrillation at age 80, a 5-year difference of -3.9 points (95% CI: -5.3, -2.5).
In the absence of clinical stroke, people with incident atrial fibrillation are likely to reach thresholds of cognitive impairment or dementia at earlier ages than people with no history of atrial fibrillation.
Increasingly, the diagnostic codes from administrative claims data are being used as clinical outcomes.
Data from the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS) were used to compare event rates and risk ...factor associations between adjudicated hospitalized cardiovascular events and claims-based methods of defining events. The outcomes of myocardial infarction (MI), stroke, and heart failure were defined in 3 ways: the CHS adjudicated event (CHSadj), selected International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Edition diagnostic codes only in the primary position for Medicare claims data from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS1st), and the same selected diagnostic codes in any position (CMSany). Conventional claims-based methods of defining events had high positive predictive values but low sensitivities. For instance, the positive predictive value of International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Edition code 410.x1 for a new acute MI in the first position was 90.6%, but this code identified only 53.8% of incident MIs. The observed event rates for CMS1st were low. For MI, the incidence was 14.9 events per 1000 person-years for CHSadj MI, 8.6 for CMS1st MI, and 12.2 for CMSany MI. In general, cardiovascular disease risk factor associations were similar across the 3 methods of defining events. Indeed, traditional cardiovascular disease risk factors were also associated with all first hospitalizations not resulting from an MI.
The use of diagnostic codes from claims data as clinical events, especially when restricted to primary diagnoses, leads to an underestimation of event rates. Additionally, claims-based events data represent a composite end point that includes the outcome of interest and selected (misclassified) nonevent hospitalizations.
The aim of this study was to determine whether use of diuretics, angiotensin-1 receptor blockers (ARB), angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACE-I), calcium channel blockers (CCB), or β-blockers ...(BB) was associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer disease (AD) dementia in participants with normal cognition or mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
Secondary longitudinal data analysis of the Ginkgo Evaluation of Memory Study in older adults at least 75 years of age with normal cognition (n = 1,928) or MCI (n = 320) over a median 6.1-year period using Cox proportional hazard models after adjusting for confounders.
Diuretic use was reported by 15.6%, ARB 6.1%, ACE-I 15.1%, CCB 14.8%, and BB 20.5%. Of the 2,248 participants, 290 (13%) developed AD dementia. Hazard ratio for incident AD dementia among participants with normal cognition was 0.51 in diuretic (95% confidence interval CI 0.31-0.82), 0.31 in ARB (95% CI 0.14-0.68), 0.50 in ACE-I (95% CI 0.29-0.83), 0.62 in CCB (95% CI 0.35-1.09), and 0.58 in BB (95% CI 0.36-0.93) users and was not significantly altered when mean systolic blood pressure was above 140 mm Hg. In participants with MCI, only diuretic use was associated with decreased risk (hazard ratio = 0.38, 95% CI 0.20-0.73).
Diuretic, ARB, and ACE-I use was, in addition to and/or independently of mean systolic blood pressure, associated with reduced risk of AD dementia in participants with normal cognition, while only diuretic use was associated with reduced risk in participants with MCI.
Data on the relation of egg consumption with risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D) and coronary heart disease (CHD) are limited and inconsistent. Few studies have controlled for overall dietary patterns in ...egg-T2D or egg-CHD analyses, and it is unclear whether any observed elevated risks of T2D and CHD with frequent egg consumption is real or due to confounding by dietary habits. We tested the hypothesis that frequent egg consumption is associated with a higher risk of T2D and CHD risk after adjustment for overall dietary patterns among adults.
We used prospective cohort design to complete time-to-event analyses.
We pooled de novo, harmonized, individual-level analyses from nine US cohorts (n = 103,811). Cox regression was used to estimate hazard ratios separately in each cohort adjusting for age, ethnicity, body mass index (BMI), exercise, smoking, alcohol intake, and dietary patterns. We pooled cohort-specific results using an inverse-variance weighted method to estimate summary relative risks.
Median age ranged from 25 to 72 years. Median egg consumption was 1 egg per week in most of the cohorts. While egg consumption up to one per week was not associated with T2D risk, consumption of ≥2 eggs per week was associated with elevated risk 27% elevated risk of T2D comparing 7+ eggs/week with none (95% CI: 16%–37%). There was little evidence for heterogeneity across cohorts and we observed similar conclusions when stratified by BMI. Overall, egg consumption was not associated with the risk of CHD. However, in a sensitivity analysis, there was a 30% higher risk of CHD (95% CI: 3%–56%) restricted to older adults consuming 5–6 eggs/week.
Our data showed an elevated risk of T2D with egg consumption of ≥2 eggs per week but not with <2 eggs/week. While there was no overall association of egg consumption with CHD risk, the elevated CHD observed with consumption of 5–6 eggs/week in older cohorts merits further investigation.
Abstract
Objectives
Better understanding of the lifestyle activities shared among older adult subgroups may inform further health behavioral interventions that can be deployed at the group or ...community level. We applied latent class analysis to characterize qualitatively distinct lifestyle engagement groups, examined their differential risk of incident dementia, and compared their predictive utility to traditional activity frequency and variety scores.
Method
Participants were from the Ginkgo Evaluation of Memory Study (N = 3,068, mean age = 78.5). Lifestyle activities were measured at baseline using the Lifestyle Activity Questionnaire. All-cause dementia was screened every 6 months and cases were clinically adjudicated. Median follow-up was 6 years. Time to dementia was assessed using discrete-time proportional hazards models, adjusted for demographic and health covariates.
Results
Latent classes provided slightly poorer case discrimination than the frequency scores but identified distinct qualitative subgroups. In the 4-class model, the Variety (22%) and Intellectual (18%) lifestyle groups had high engagement in intellectual activities, whereas the Variety and Social groups (32%) had high engagement in formal social activities. Compared to the Least Active group (28%), the Variety (hazard ratio HR = 0.67, 95% confidence interval CI: 0.48, 0.93) and Intellectual (HR = 0.65, 95% CI: 0.45, 0.93) groups had significantly lower risk of incident dementia, but only among those without prevalent mild cognitive impairment.
Discussion
Older adults highly engaged in intellectual activities, but not necessarily social activities, had the lowest risk of incident dementia. Activity frequency scores provided only slightly better case discrimination than activity variety scores and latent classes. Latent classes of older adults differed by their amount and types of activities, which may inform intervention design.
An ongoing debate in demography has focused on whether the human lifespan has a maximal natural limit. Taking a mechanistic perspective, and knowing that short telomeres are associated with ...diminished longevity, we examined whether telomere length dynamics during adult life could set a maximal natural lifespan limit. We define leukocyte telomere length of 5 kb as the 'telomeric brink', which denotes a high risk of imminent death. We show that a subset of adults may reach the telomeric brink within the current life expectancy and more so for a 100-year life expectancy. Thus, secular trends in life expectancy should confront a biological limit due to crossing the telomeric brink.
OBJECTIVES: To determine the relative effect of five chronic conditions on four representative universal health outcomes.
DESIGN: Cross‐sectional.
SETTING: Cardiovascular Health Study.
PARTICIPANTS: ...Five thousand two hundred and ninety‐eight community‐living participants aged 65 and older.
MEASUREMENTS: Multiple regression and Cox models were used to determine the effect of heart failure (HF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), osteoarthritis, depression, and cognitive impairment on self‐rated health, 12 basic and instrumental activities of daily living (ADLs and IADLs), six‐item symptom burden scale, and death.
RESULTS: Each condition adversely affected self‐rated health (P<.001) and ADLs and IADLs (P<.001). For example, persons with HF performed 0.70±0.08 fewer ADLs and IADLs than those without; persons with depression and persons with cognitive impairment performed 0.59±0.04 and 0.58±0.06 fewer activities, respectively, than those without these conditions. Depression, HF, COPD, and osteoarthritis were associated with 1.18±0.04, 0.40±0.08, 0.40±0.05, and 0.57±0.03 more symptoms, respectively, in individuals with these conditions than in those without. HF (hazard ratio (HR)=2.84, 95% confidence interval (CI)=1.97–4.10), COPD (2.62, 95% CI=1.94–3.53), cognitive impairment (2.05, 95% CI=1.47–2.85), and depression (1.47, 95% CI=1.08–2.01) were each associated with death within 2 years. Several paired combinations of conditions had synergistic effects on ADLs and IADLs. For example, individuals with HF plus depression performed 2.0 fewer activities than persons with neither condition, versus the 1.3 fewer activities expected from adding the effects of the two conditions together.
CONCLUSION: Universal health outcomes may provide a common metric for measuring the effects of multiple conditions and their treatments. The varying effects of the conditions across universal outcomes could inform care priorities.
Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) is related to diseases of aging, but studies of mortality have been inconsistent.
We evaluated LTL in relation to total mortality and specific cause of death in 1,136 ...participants of the Cardiovascular Health Study who provided blood samples in 1992-1993 and survived through 1997-1998. LTL was measured by Southern blots of the terminal restriction fragments. Cause of death was classified by a committee of physicians reviewing death certificates, medical records, and informant interviews.
A total of 468 (41.2%) deaths occurred over 6.1 years of follow-up in participants with mean age of 73.9 years (SD 4.7), 65.4% female, and 14.8% African American. Although increased age and male gender were associated with shorter LTLs, African Americans had significantly longer LTLs independent of age and sex (p < .001). Adjusted for age, sex, and race, persons with the shortest quartile of LTL were 60% more likely to die during follow-up than those within the longest quartile (hazard ratio: 1.61, 95% confidence interval: 1.22-2.12, p = .001). The association remained after adjustment for cardiovascular disease risk factors. Evaluations of cause of death found LTL to be related to deaths due to an infectious disease etiology (hazard ratio: 2.80, 95% confidence interval: 1.32-5.94, p = .007), whereas a borderline association was found for cardiac deaths (hazard ratio: 1.82, 95% confidence interval: 0.95-3.49, p = .07) in adjusted models. Risk estimates for deaths due to cancer, dementia, and ischemic stroke were not significant.
These data weakly corroborate prior findings of associations between LTL and mortality in the elderly.
The telomere length of replicating somatic cells is inversely correlated with age and has been reported to be associated cross-sectionally with cardiovascular disease (CVD). Leukocyte telomere ...length, as expressed by mean terminal restriction fragment (TRF) length, was measured in 419 randomly selected participants from the Cardiovascular Health Study, comprising a community-dwelling cohort recruited in four US communities. The authors investigated associations between TRF length and selected measures of subclinical CVD/risk factors for CVD (data were collected at the 1992/1993 clinic visit) and incident CVD (ascertained through June 2002). In these participants (average age = 74.2 years (standard deviation, 5.2)), mean TRF length was 6.3 kilobase pairs (standard deviation, 0.62). Significant or borderline inverse associations were found between TRF length and diabetes, glucose, insulin, diastolic blood pressure, carotid intima-media thickness, and interleukin-6. Associations with body size and C-reactive protein were modified by gender and age, occurring only in men and in participants aged 73 years or younger. In younger (but not older) participants, each shortened kilobase pair of TRF corresponded with a threefold increased risk of myocardial infarction (hazard ratio = 3.08, 95% confidence interval: 1.22, 7.73) and stroke (hazard ratio = 3.22, 95% confidence interval: 1.29, 8.02). These results support the hypotheses that telomere attrition may be related to diseases of aging through mechanisms involving oxidative stress, inflammation, and progression to CVD.
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