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Age and Ageing Advance Access originally published online on August 3, 2009
Age and Ageing 2009 38(6):669-675; doi:10.1093/ageing/afp127
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press [on behalf of the British Geriatrics Society]. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Cognitive performance in community-dwelling English- and Spanish-speaking seniors

Alex D. Federman1, Helen Cole1 and Mary Sano2,3

1 Division of General Internal Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA
2 Department of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA
3 Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center, Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Bronx, NY, USA

Address correspondence to: A. D. Federman. Division of General Internal Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, One Gustave L. Levy Place, Box 1087, New York, NY 10029, USA. Tel: (+1) 212 824 7565; Fax: (+1) 212 824 2317. Email: alex.federman{at}mssm.edu

Objectives: to examine the association of language (English vs Spanish), and commonly used measures of memory and word fluency among older adults.

Design: cross-sectional.

Setting: community-based settings in New York City, including senior centres and residential complexes.

Subjects: four hundred and twenty independently living adults aged 60 or older (mean 73.8 years).

Methods: participants completed the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE), animal naming test (ANT) and Wechsler Memory Scale III (WMS) Story A immediate and delayed subtests. Scores were examined by strata of language, age or education and for different thresholds of the MMSE. We tested the association of language and cognitive test performance using multivariable linear regression.

Results: twenty-one per cent of subjects were interviewed in Spanish and 16.2% reported poor-fair English proficiency. The mean WMS scores were not statistically different between English and Spanish groups (immediate recall, 9.9 vs 9.5, P = 0.44; delayed recall, 8.0 vs 7.6, P = 0.36, respectively), whereas ANT scores did differ (16.6 vs 14.3, P < 0.0001). These associations were consistent across MMSE thresholds. The association of language and ANT score was not significant after accounting for education.

Conclusions: we found little difference in performance on the Story A subtests from the WMS suggesting that this test may be used for both English- and Spanish-speaking populations. Results suggest that variations in ANT performance may be accounted for by adjusting for the level of education. These results have important implications for the generalisability of test scores among diverse older populations.

Keywords: elderly, cognition, language, Spanish

Received 22 January 2009; accepted in revised form 14 May 2009.


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