Premium
Multiscale motor activity regulation and cognitive performance in middle‐aged adults: A cross‐sectional study using baseline data of UK Biobank Cohort
Author(s) -
Li Peng,
Ulsa Ma Cherrysse,
Zheng Xi,
Yang HuiWen,
Gao Lei,
Hu Kun
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
alzheimer's and dementia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.713
H-Index - 118
eISSN - 1552-5279
pISSN - 1552-5260
DOI - 10.1002/alz.056027
Subject(s) - biobank , neurocognitive , cohort , cognition , psychology , logistic regression , population , cognitive decline , effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance , cognitive test , episodic memory , confidence interval , medicine , audiology , demography , clinical psychology , dementia , disease , psychiatry , biology , genetics , environmental health , sociology
Abstract Background Motor activity fluctuations in healthy young humans display robust temporal correlations across a wide range of time scales. The multiscale correlations are altered in elderly adults, and their changes are associated with cognitive decline and risk for Alzheimer’s disease. We sought to examine whether the multiscale regulation is associated with cognitive performance in middle age using a population‐based cohort. Method We analyzed motor activity recordings that were collected from 97,284 non‐demented participants [aged 39‐70 (mean±SD: 56.1±7.8) years old; female: 54,776 (56.3%)] in the UK Biobank. The detrended fluctuation analysis was performed to quantify temporal correlations at time scales ≤90 min (α1) and ≥2 h (α2; up to 10 h) according to previous studies. Participants also completed four neurocognitive tests, and poorer cognitive performance was characterized by longer reaction time (RT; for information processing speed), more errors made in the pairs matching test (for visual episodic memory), lower fluid intelligence (FI) score (for reasoning), or making incorrect first choice during the prospective memory (PM) test. Linear regression models (or logistic regression for PM) were used to examine the associations of each cognitive outcome with α 1 and, separately α 2 , adjusted for ethnicity, college, social‐economic status, mental and behavioral disorders, diseases of the nervous system, and number of treatments/medications. The 95% confidence intervals (CI) were derived non‐parametrically based on 1,000 bootstrapped samples with replacement. Result Both α 1 and α 2 showed normal distributions: α 1 =0.99±0.05 (SD) and α 2 =0.91±0.11. There was a positive association between α 1 and FI with 1‐SD decrease of α 1 corresponding to a decrease of 0.03 in FI (95% CI 0.01—0.05) that was about the effect of being 2 years older. α 2 was negatively associated with RT and positively associated with FI; for 1‐SD decrease in α 2 , participants took ln(1 ms) longer during RT, and FI decreased by 0.04 (95% CI 0.02—0.06), both equivalent to being ∼2.5‐3 years older. Conclusion Multiscale motor activity regulation is linked to cognitive performance of specific domains in the middle‐aged population. Further studies are required to establish the relevance of these domain‐specific associations to incident dementia in later life and to understand their underlying neurobiology.