Commentary on “The NIH Cognitive and Emotional Health Project: Report of the Critical Evaluation Study Committee.”

m t p o s s i t s t u g m a a a a e The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Cognitive and motional Health Project recently published their “Report f the Critical Evaluation Study Committee.” The Commitee chose to evaluate factors that preserve cognitive and motional health, instead of factors associated with disorers or other negative outcomes. However, as the authors oint out, the majority of studies are concerned with disases or bad outcomes, such as cognitive decline or depresive symptoms. Therefore, the results of this review are ased mainly on the assumption that if a factor is associated ith impaired cognitive or emotional health, its absence ould be related to preserved or improved cognitive funcion (and factors that are associated with less impairment hould be related to improved function). However, as the ommittee also notes, even if these assumptions are true, uccessful aging should be distinguished from normal aging nd unsuccessful aging. Preserved or even improved cogitive and emotional health might thus be related to other actors than what is found for deteriorating emotional and ognitive function and, even more so, for defined disorders. When evaluating factors associated with these outcomes, he Study Committee chose to evaluate only results from a umber of preselected large epidemiologic studies (more han 500 participants, age greater than 65 years, longitudinal esign, and including measurements of at least memory and ne more cognitive domain and measurement of depression nd one more emotional domain). The report is, thus, not a omprehensive meta-analysis of all studies published in the rea. In this way, the Committee hoped to circumvent the roblem of publication bias; specifically the studies were arge enough for meaningful interpretations of negative ndings. However, the report is based on published articles. o effort seems to have been made to elucidate possible