Older women's cognitive and affective response to moderate drinking

Autor: Teena Zimmerman, Heather Becker, Graham J. McDougall
Rok vydání: 2004
Předmět:
Zdroj: International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. 19:1095-1102
ISSN: 1099-1166
0885-6230
DOI: 10.1002/gps.1216
Popis: Objective In this paper we investigated the question, how do older women who drink moderate amounts of alcohol differ from those who do not drink on measurements of cognitive function, memory, affect and health? Methods The nonprobability sample of female participants (n = 182) averaged 75 years of age and had a Mini Mental State Examination scores of 28. The participants were asked to indicate whether they drank alcohol or abstained (yes/no) and if they indicated that they did drink, to describe how many drinks they consumed in a given period of time (day/week/month). Results None of the participants acknowledged drinking more than 2 drinks a day. Caucasian women had the largest number of moderate drinkers (53% vs 47%), while the majority of African–American and Hispanic women reported not drinking. The moderate drinkers reported less depression, had higher self-reported health, performed better on instrumental everyday tasks, had stronger memory self-efficacy, and used more strategies to improve memory performance. In addition, these women had higher performance on tests of executive function: attention, concentration, psychomotor skills, verbal-associative capacities, and oral fluency. Conclusions The circumstances under which people drink are complex and were not evaluated in this study. Therefore, rather than endorsing drinking behavior, these findings suggest that future research might examine why elders make the decision to drink, the circumstances that predispose women to drink (alone/with others), and other qualities that characterize female drinkers over the age of 65. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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