# Assessing the interactive effect of lifetime and old age cognitive engagement on cognitive decline and dementia: cognitive reserve versus use it or lose it

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR · 2022 · $391,479

## Abstract

Project Summary
 This project will examine the long-term effects of lifetime cognitive engagement, the short-term effects of
cognitive engagement in old age, and the mediating effect of lifetime cognitive engagement on those short-
term effects. This examination will be made possible by using rich data from the large, longitudinal but complex
Health and Retirement Study (HRS), including its supplements such as the Consumption and Activities Mail
Survey (CAMS), the Participant Lifestyle Questionnaire (PLQ), and the Life History Mail Survey (LHMS). To
make use of the data we will create measures of cognitive engagement and build a statistical model that can
jointly estimate long-term associations and short-term effects. The results of our analysis will help assess the
importance of the long-term effects of cognitive engagement over the life course, through the mechanism of
cognitive reserve, and the shorter term effects of cognitive engagement at older ages, through “use-it-or-lose-
it”. We will develop measures of cognitive engagement, defined as the extent to which people use their brains,
for a large set of subjects spanning their entire lives. To measure cognitive engagement in young and middle
ages, we will use complete and harmonized histories of education and employment and detailed descriptions
of jobs that include requirements of cognitive and social tasks. To measure cognitive engagement in older
ages, we will use many variables on work and non-work activities, scattered around different parts of the
survey and available for different subsets of the respondents. We will complement the activity-based measures
by a novel measure based on response patterns to cognitively demanding survey questions, such as don't
know responses, rounded and crude value responses, longitudinal variation of responses, and other aspects of
response style. All of these measures make use of information on what people do in contrast with existing
measures of cognitive engagement that are based on summary measures of educational attainment or self-
reports about liking to engage in cognitively demanding activities. Our measures will allow us to analyze how
lifetime cognitive engagement predicts interpersonal differences in cognitive engagement in old age and how
health, functional limitations and depression may confound or interact with such effects. The results of our
analysis will enhance our understanding of the complex role cognitive reserve may play in shaping cognitive
decline and dementia in old age.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10447680
- **Project number:** 5R01AG062447-03
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR
- **Principal Investigator:** Brooke Helppie-McFall
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $391,479
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-06-01 → 2023-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10447680

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10447680, Assessing the interactive effect of lifetime and old age cognitive engagement on cognitive decline and dementia: cognitive reserve versus use it or lose it (5R01AG062447-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10447680. Licensed CC0.

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