Relationship between work-related cognitive reserve and overall cognitive functioning in older women: longitudinal study

This study aimed to investigate the changes in overall cognitive functioning over a three-year period and to examine the possible role of work-related cognitive reserve in older women. 23 women aged 68 – 80 (M = 71,78, SD = 4,77), without self-reported neurological or psychiatric disorders, participated in the study. The overall cognitive functioning was evaluated with Montreal Cognitive Assessment scale (MoCA, Nasreddine et al., 2005), which evaluates six domains of cognitive processes, while work-related cognitive reserve (CR) index was obtained with Cognitive Reserve Index questionnaire (Nucci, Mapelli, & Mondini, 2012). Data were acquired with a three-year interval between the assessments. Descriptive statistics of the results indicated that all participants had medium to high cognitive reserve (CR) scores (95 – 176, M = 118.83, SD = 9.61). To identify the relationship between work-related CR and changes in overall cognitive functioning, Spearman rank correlation coefficient was used and the analysis showed a statistically significant strong association between the variables (r = .572, p = .004). Further, linear regression analysis was used to predict the role of work-related CR in the change in MoCA scores, which showed a weak prediction (R2 = .15, F(21) = 5.01, p = .036). while the results initially showed a strong relationship between work-related CR and changes in overall cognitive functioning, the results did not confirm that CR plays a significant role in predicting changes in cognitive functioning over time. This may be related to the relatively small sample of participants, as well as the overall tendency of higher CR scores in the sample. Further studies with larger sample size and more increased year gaps would be beneficial.