Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin, Madison, United States.
Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, United States.
Soc Sci Med. 2023 Mar;320:115649. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115649. Epub 2023 Jan 3.
While much previous work linking fertility history with late-life cognition has focused on a narrow set of cognitive measures and/or has used modest sample sizes in the analysis, our paper expands the size and scope of these linkages by analyzing cognitive function across five domains and precisely estimating gendered patterns between men and women. Results point to important gendered associations between parity and cognition: having children is likely associated with better cognitive function for fathers in all five domains. However, mothers show worse cognitive function in some domains (i.e., numeric memory, prospective memory, and fluid intelligence) than childless women. We explore the possibility of confounding in these associations and rule out the effects of genetic cognitive ability on fertility. We also find that adding controls for educational attainment differ by gender-strengthening associations between parity and cognition for men and largely eliminating them for women. The findings support previous work done on how life course contexts may link to the risk of dementia or cognitive impairment, highlighting parity as potential protective or risk factors to parents' cognitive health. The use of five cognitive domains yields variations in results, giving implications on measure selection of cognitive function and calling for replicated work covering more cognitive domains.
虽然之前有很多将生育史与晚年认知联系起来的研究主要集中在一系列狭隘的认知测量上，或者在分析中使用了适度的样本量，但我们的论文通过分析五个领域的认知功能，并准确估计男性和女性之间的性别模式，扩展了这些联系的规模和范围。研究结果表明，生育与认知之间存在重要的性别关联：对于所有五个领域的父亲来说，有孩子可能与更好的认知功能有关。然而，与没有孩子的女性相比，母亲在一些领域（即数字记忆、前瞻性记忆和流体智力）的认知功能更差。我们探讨了这些关联中可能存在的混杂因素，并排除了遗传认知能力对生育的影响。我们还发现，根据性别调整教育程度的控制因素会加强男性生育与认知之间的关联，而在女性中则基本消除了这些关联。这些发现支持了之前关于生活环境如何与痴呆或认知障碍风险相关的研究，强调了生育对于父母认知健康的潜在保护或风险因素。使用五个认知领域得出了不同的结果，这对认知功能的测量选择有影响，并呼吁开展更多涵盖更多认知领域的复制研究。
