Journal
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN GERIATRICS SOCIETY
Volume 57, Issue 12, Pages 2300-2305Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2009.02559.x
Keywords
language; aging; hypertension; diabetes mellitus
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) [AG 14345]
- Department of Veterans Affairs Clinical Sciences Research and Development Program
- Harold Goodglass Aphasia Research Core Center [P30 DC05027]
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
- NIH [P30-DC0S207, R01-AG1.8436, 08111301]
- National Academies Keck Futures Initiative.
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OBJECTIVES: To evaluate effects of health status on word-finding difficulty in aging, adjusting for the known contributors of education, sex, and ethnicity. DESIGN: Cross-sectional. SETTING: Community. PARTICIPANTS: Two hundred eighty-four adults aged 55 to 85 (48.6% female) participating in an ongoing longitudinal study of language in aging. MEASUREMENTS: Medical, neurological, and laboratory evaluations to determine health status and presence or absence of hypertension and diabetes mellitus. Lexical retrieval evaluated with the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and Action Naming Test. RESULTS: Unadjusted regression models showed that presence of diabetes mellitus was not related to naming. Presence of hypertension was associated with significantly lower accuracy on both tasks (P<.02). Adjustment for demographics attenuated the effect of hypertension (P<.08). For the BNT, a variable combining presence, treatment, and control of hypertension was marginally significant (P<.10), with subjects with uncontrolled hypertension being least accurate (91.4%). Previously observed findings regarding the effects of age, education, sex, and ethnicity were confirmed. CONCLUSION: In this sample of older adults, hypertension contributed to the word-finding difficulty of normal aging, but diabetes mellitus did not. J Am Geriatr Soc 57:2300-2305, 2009.
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