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Women with PTSD Show Accelerated Cognitive Decline in Midlife
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was associated with accelerated cognitive decline in middle-aged women, according to a large-scale prospective cohort study published in JAMA Network Open.
“Given that cognitive decline is associated with subsequent Alzheimer disease and related dementias, better understanding of this association may be important to promote healthy aging,” wrote corresponding author Jiaxuan Liu, MPH, of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues. “These findings also highlight the importance of PTSD prevention and treatment to ensure healthy cognitive aging and suggest the value of earlier cognitive screening among women with PTSD.”
The study included 12,270 trauma-exposed women aged 50 to 71 from the Nurses’ Health Study II. Participants completed up to five cognitive assessments between October 2014 and July 2019.
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A higher number of PTSD symptoms was linked with worse cognitive trajectories, the study showed. Compared with women with no PTSD symptoms, those with 6 or 7 PTSD symptoms showed significantly more decline in learning and working memory as well as psychomotor speed and attention after adjustment for demographic characteristics.
“In models adjusted for practice effects, women with high PTSD symptom levels had approximately 2 times faster cognitive decline in learning and working memory than those with no PTSD symptoms,” researchers reported.
Additionally, women with 4 or 5 PTSD symptoms showed significantly greater decline in learning and working memory compared with women with no PTSD symptoms, the study showed.
“Adjustment for health factors had few consequences for the association of PTSD with cognitive change,” researchers wrote, “both because these factors did not differ by PTSD symptom level and because, with the exception of age and myocardial infarction, these health factors were not associated with cognitive change in our data.”
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