Education, wealth, and cognitive function in later life

Population-based studies of health often use education as the sole indicator of socioeconomic status (SES); the in-dependent contributions of education and other SES covariates are rarely delineated. Using Wave 1 of the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old study, the authors examined the extent to which educational attain-ment influences performance on three separate domains of cognitive status by race and Latino ethnicity and in-troduced controls for wealth and household income. Results indicate that the education effect is minimally weakened after adjusting for wealth; the wealth effect, however, is greatly attenuated after adjusting for educa-tion. Blacks and Whites exhibited a similar education–cognition relationship; Latino elderly did not experience commensurate gains in cognitive function with increasing education. Results suggest that although the educa-tion–cognition relationship may in part reflect an SES gradient, the association is more likely due to the process and consequences of education itself. TUDIES of elders consistently find a strong inverse as-sociation between years of formal schooling and cogni-tive functioning. The association has been seen regardless of whether the outcome is the score on a cognitive function screener such as the Mini-Mental State Exam, a threshold score used to define cognitive impairment, a decline in cog-nitive function, or the clinical diagnosis of dementia (Brayn