Older adults who reported stronger social support at the outset of a large aging study showed less decline in attention over the following years, while those under sustained chronic stress declined faster in several thinking skills. The findings come from researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, published in Alzheimer's & Dementia.
The team followed 3,873 adults aged 50 and older enrolled in the Health and Aging Brain Study-Health Disparities (HABS-HD), tracking changes in attention, memory, language and executive function - the mental toolkit used for planning, organizing and problem solving. What set the analysis apart was that it looked at stress and social support together, and compared how the patterns played out across different demographic groups rather than treating older adults as a single population.
The group differences were striking. Women reporting higher chronic stress showed greater declines in attention and language than men did. Hispanic participants reporting higher chronic stress showed greater memory decline than non-Hispanic participants. The benefit of social support for attention, by contrast, held up regardless of sex or race.
Perhaps the most consequential detail is that the two factors operated independently: having a strong support network did not cancel out the cognitive decline associated with chronic stress. That undercuts a comforting assumption - that good relationships can simply buffer a stressful life - and suggests the two would need to be addressed separately in any effort to protect thinking skills as people age.