PURPOSE Cognitive training improves mental abilities in older adults, but the benefit to minority elders is unclear. We conducted a subgroup analysis of subjects in the SeniorWISE (Wisdom Is Simply Exploration) trial to examine this issue. DESIGN AND METHODS SeniorWISE was a Phase 3 randomized trial that enrolled 265 nondemented community-dwelling older adults aged 65 years and older between ...

Traditional methods of developing tests have been driven by item content specification and have relied on the use of summed ordinal scores in an attempt to create a quantitative index of ability. There are fundamental problems with this approach to test development. The first problem is that the summing of qualitative ordinal counts to create a total score does not result in a number that is a ...

BACKGROUND As for all individuals, the Internet is important in the everyday life of older adults. Research on older adults' use of the Internet has merely focused on users versus nonusers and consequences of Internet use and nonuse. Older adults are a heterogeneous group, which may implicate that their use of the Internet is diverse as well. Older adults can use the Internet for different acti...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Functional capacity is a predictor, as well as a consequence, of stroke. However, little research has been done to examine whether higher-level functional capacity above basic activities of daily living is a predictor of stroke. METHODS We followed 1493 Japanese community-dwelling adults aged ≥60 years (mean age, 70.1 years) who were independent in basic activities of d...

Lawton and Brody's eight-item Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) scale is used often with elderly patients but scored in several different ways. We scored the IADL with seven popular procedures ranging from relatively simple to complex (Guttman scores, summed and Rasch scores from dichotomous, trichotomous, and polytomous items) in a sample of rural elders (N = 231). We compared the...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether participants with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) differ from cognitively normal (NC) older adults on traditional and novel informant-based measures of activities of daily living (ADL) and to identify cognitive correlates of ADLs among participants with MCI. DESIGN Cross-sectional. SETTING University medical setting. PARTICIPANTS Seventy-seven participants (...

AIMS Instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) are tasks that are necessary for independent community living. These tasks often require intact physical and cognitive function, the impairment of which may adversely affect health in older adults. In the current study, we examined the association between IADL impairment and incident heart failure (HF) in community-dwelling older adults. ME...

Common scales for physical functioning are not directly comparable without harmonization techniques, complicating attempts to pool data across studies. Our aim was to provide a standardized metric for physical functioning in adults based on basic and instrumental activities of daily living scaled to NIH PROMIS norms. We provide an item bank to compare the difficulty of various physical function...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The positive effects of galantamine on cognition and activities of daily living (ADL) in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are thought to be mediated via improvements in attention. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of galantamine on attention in AD patients using a computerized attention test and to elucidate the relationship between improvements in attention a...

OBJECTIVES This brief report examines whether significant changes in cognition, functional dependence, health service use, and out-of-pocket medical expenditures (OOPMD) occur in the years prior to a physician-identified memory problem in a nationally representative sample of older adults. METHOD Longitudinal data from the RAND-Health and Retirement Survey were utilized. Those who reported a ...