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Memory Loss Slower for Working Women

Working women had slower memory decline as they aged than women who had not worked outside the home, a longitudinal study found.

Non-working mothers were twice as likely to develop memory impairment at age 70 as working married mothers, reported Elizabeth Rose Mayeda, PhD, MPH, of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in Los Angeles, and co-authors.

Between ages 60 and 70, average memory score decline was 0.69 (95% CI -0.75 to -0.63) standardized units among working married mothers, but 1.25 (95% CI -1.46 to -1.03) units among non-working single mothers (RR 2.0), and 1.09 (95% CI -1.23 to -0.94) standardized units among non-working married mothers (RR 1.94), they wrote in Neurology.

Findings were similar for women without children (although the analysis excluded married non-mothers who never worked).

Rates of memory decline after age 55 were slower among women who spent substantial amounts of time in the workforce in earlier years, even among women who left employment at some point, such as to raise children.

“We found the timing of labor force participation did not appear to matter,” Mayeda said in a statement.

“While there’s no debate that managing a home and a family can be a complex and full-time job, our study suggests that engaging in paid work may offer some protection when it comes to memory loss — possibly due to cognitive stimulation, social engagement, or financial security,” she added.

Identifying modifiable risk factors among women may be especially important because nearly two-thirds of Alzheimer’s dementia patients in the U.S. are female, the researchers noted. “Policies that help women with children participate in the workforce may be an effective strategy to prevent memory decline in women,” Mayeda said.

“Of studies in the dementia field that have incorporated sex and gender, the vast majority focus on sex differences or sex-specific factors including pregnancy, the menopausal transition and use of hormone therapy, genetics, or differences in biomarker profiles,” said Michelle Mielke, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and Bryan James, PhD, of Rush University in Chicago, in an editorial accompanying the study.

Little research has focused on gender differences in workforce participation and late-life cognitive outcomes, Mielke and James wrote. “This is particularly relevant for women because life course patterns of working, child-rearing, and marriage have changed dramatically over the last century, with an increasing number of women joining the paid labor force,” they pointed out.

The expansion of women into the labor force in the mid-20th century “may have provided a new avenue of cognitive reserve for women via enhanced social stimulation and cognitive engagement,” they added.

Mayeda and colleagues followed 6,189 women in the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study for an average of 12.3 years. Participants had a mean baseline age of 57. Memory performance was assessed biennially from 1995-2016 using standardized tests of immediate and delayed word list recall.

The researchers grouped participants into five clusters based on their work-family profile from ages 16 to 50: 4,326 were classified as working married mothers, 530 as working single mothers, 488 as working non-mothers, 526 as non-working married mothers, and 319 as non-working single mothers.

Analyses accounted for potential early-life confounders including race and ethnicity, childhood socioeconomic status, and education. In fully adjusted models, there were no differences in average memory scores among groups at age 55.

Overall, the average rate of memory score decline was similar for the two groups who did not engage in paid work, non-working married and single mothers. Secondary analyses showed the average memory score decline between ages 60 and 70 was -0.44 standardized units (95% CI -0.56 to -0.32) greater among women who had not been employed compared with women who had participated in the paid labor force.

The study had several limitations, the researchers said. Non-marital partnerships were not included in the analysis. The researchers relied on retrospective reporting of employment, marriage, and parenthood. They could not distinguish full-time from part-time employment and did not account for volunteer work. Memory performance was evaluated with a brief assessment of word recall and other cognitive domains were not examined.

“Though not a limitation to the internal validity of this study, it should be noted that this association can only be generalized to American women,” Mielke and James wrote. “This is important, considering societal and historical differences in women’s workforce participation across countries, along with some evidence that disparities in dementia risk between men and women are different in other contexts.”

  • Judy George covers neurology and neuroscience news for MedPage Today, writing about brain aging, Alzheimer’s, dementia, MS, rare diseases, epilepsy, autism, headache, stroke, Parkinson’s, ALS, concussion, CTE, sleep, pain, and more. Follow

Disclosures

The study was supported by the National Institute on Aging and the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust.

Neither the researchers nor the editorialists reported any relevant disclosures.

Source: MedicalNewsToday.com