Staying active in old age is key to enjoying better health, both physical and mental, and older adults who are retired may spend more time on activities like volunteering, which a new study has linked to better cognitive function. Their results have just been presented at the Alzheimer’s Association® International Congress (AAIC) 2023, in Amsterdam, (The Netherlands) and online, and show that people who work as volunteers in the elderly have better executive function and memory episodic.
“Volunteers are the pillars of all communities and essential to the success and impact of many organizations, including the Alzheimer’s Association,” said Donna McCullough, Alzheimer’s Association chief of mission and field operations. “We hope this new data will encourage people of all ages and backgrounds to volunteer locally, not only to benefit their communities, but potentially their own brain and cognitive health.”
Volunteer activities, such as supporting educational, religious, medical or other charitable organizations, are a great opportunity for older adults to be more physically active, while promoting their social interaction and providing them with cognitive stimulation that can protect the brain Despite all of its benefits, many people are unaware of the relationship between volunteering and cognitive function, especially those who reside in large and diverse populations.
Volunteering helps protect against cognitive decline
Yi Lor, an epidemiology doctoral student at the University of California Davis, and the studies’ principal investigator, Rachel Whitmer, examined the volunteering habits of 2,476 older adults with an average age of about 74 and racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds. as 48% were black, 20% white, 17% Asian, and 14% Latino in the Kaiser Healthy Aging and Diverse Life Experiences Study (KHANDLE) and Study of Healthy Aging in African Americans (STAR). In the combined group, 1,167 (43%) participants stated that they had volunteered in the past year.
“Volunteering may be important for improving cognition in later life and could serve as a simple intervention to protect against the risk of Alzheimer’s and associated dementias”
The researchers found that volunteering was associated with better baseline scores on tests of executive function and verbal episodic memory in this study group after accounting for factors such as age, gender, education, economic status, the effects of practice and interview mode (phone and in person). Volunteering was also associated with a trend toward less cognitive decline over the 1.2-year follow-up time, but this association did not reach statistical significance. Additionally, those who volunteered several times a week had the highest levels of executive function.
“Volunteering may be important in improving cognition in later life and could serve as a simple intervention in all older adults to protect against the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and associated dementias,” Lor says. “Our next steps are to examine whether volunteering protects against cognitive decline, and how physical and mental health may affect this relationship,” she concludes.
