Search

Introduction: Personality traits and neuropsychiatric symptoms such as neuroticism and depression share genetic overlap and have both been identified as risks factors for development of aging-related neurocognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study aimed to examine revised personality factors derived from the Temperament and Character Inventory, previously shown to be associated with psychiatric disorders, as predictors of neuropsychiatric, cognitive, and brain trajectories of participants from a population-based aging study., Methods: Mixed-effect linear regression analyses were conducted on data for the full sample ( N max  = 1,286), and a healthy subsample not converting to AD-dementia during 25-year follow-up ( N max  = 1,145), complemented with Cox proportional regression models to determine risk factors for conversion to clinical AD., Results: Two personality factors, Closeness to Experience (CE: avoidance of new stimuli, high anxiety, pessimistic anticipation, low reward seeking) and Tendence to Liabilities (TL: inability to change, low autonomy, unaware of the value of their existence) were associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms, stress (CE), sleep disturbance (TL), as well as greater decline in memory, vocabulary and verbal fluency in the full sample. Higher CE was additionally associated with greater memory decline across 25 years in the healthy subsample, and faster right hippocampal volume reduction across 8 years in a neuroimaging subsample ( N  = 216). Most, but not all, personality-cognition associations persisted after controlling for diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Concerning risks for conversion to AD, higher age, and APOE -ε4, but none of the personality measures, were significant predictors., Conclusion: The results indicate that personality traits associated with psychiatric symptoms predict accelerated age-related neurocognitive declines even in the absence of neurodegenerative disease. The attenuation of some personality effects on cognition after adjustment for health indicators suggests that those effects may be partly mediated by somatic health. Taken together, the results further emphasize the importance of personality traits in neurocognitive aging and underscore the need for an integrative (biopsychosocial) perspective of normal and pathological age-related cognitive decline., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Ronat, Rönnlund, Adolfsson, Hanganu and Pudas.)

Background: Loneliness is most prevalent during adolescence and late life and has been associated with mental health disorders as well as with cognitive decline during aging. Associations between longitudinal measures of loneliness and verbal episodic memory and brain structure should thus be investigated., Methods: We sought to determine associations between loneliness and verbal episodic memory as well as loneliness and hippocampal volume trajectories across three longitudinal cohorts within the Lifebrain Consortium, including children, adolescents ( N = 69, age range 10-15 at baseline examination) and older adults ( N = 1468 over 60). We also explored putative loneliness correlates of cortical thinning across the entire cortical mantle., Results: Loneliness was associated with worsening of verbal episodic memory in one cohort of older adults. Specifically, reporting medium to high levels of loneliness over time was related to significantly increased memory loss at follow-up examinations. The significance of the loneliness-memory change association was lost when eight participants were excluded after having developed dementia in any of the subsequent follow-up assessments. No significant structural brain correlates of loneliness were found, neither hippocampal volume change nor cortical thinning., Conclusion: In the present longitudinal European multicenter study, the association between loneliness and episodic memory was mainly driven by individuals exhibiting progressive cognitive decline, which reinforces previous findings associating loneliness with cognitive impairment and dementia., Competing Interests: CD is a founder, stockowner, board member, and consultant in Vitas Ltd. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Solé-Padullés, Macià, Andersson, Stiernstedt, Pudas, Düzel, Zsoldos, Ebmeier, Binnewies, Drevon, Brandmaier, Mowinckel, Fjell, Madsen, Baaré, Lindenberger, Nyberg, Walhovd and Bartrés-Faz.)

Declarative memory abilities change across adulthood. Semantic memory and autobiographic episodic knowledge can remain stable or even increase from mid- to late adulthood, while episodic memory abilities decline in later adulthood. Although it is well known that prior knowledge influences new learning, it is unclear whether the experiential growth of knowledge and memory traces across the lifespan may drive favorable adaptations in some basic memory processes. We hypothesized that an increased reliance on memory integration may be an adaptive mechanism to handle increased interference from accumulating memory traces and knowledge across adulthood. In turn, this may confer an improved ability for integration, observable in middle-age, before the onset of major aging-related declines. We further tested whether the hypothesized increase would be associated with previously observed reductions in memory discrimination performance in midlife. Data from a sample of healthy middle-aged (40-50 years, n = 40) and younger adults (20-28 years, n = 41) did not support the hypothesis of improved integration, as assessed by an associative inference paradigm. Instead, age-equivalent performance on both integration and discrimination measures were observed [Bayes factors (BFs) 10 = 0.19-0.25], along with expected higher verbal knowledge and slower perceptual speed for middle-aged [(BFs) 10 = 8.52-73.52]. The results contribute to an increased understanding of memory processing in midlife, an understudied portion of the lifespan, and suggest that two core episodic memory processes, integration and discrimination, can be maintained in healthy middle-aged adults., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Samrani, Lundquist and Pudas.)