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. 2009 Dec;57(12):2300-5.
doi: 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2009.02559.x.

Effects of health status on word finding in aging

Martin L Albert  1 , Avron Spiro 3rd, Keely J Sayers, Jason A Cohen, Christopher B Brady, Mira Goral, Loraine K Obler
Affiliations

Effects of health status on word finding in aging

Martin L Albert et al. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2009 Dec.

Abstract

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest: All authors verify that they have no financial or personal conflict of interest with this manuscript.

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