Temporal stability of social support and verbal interactions in middle-aged and older adults: Test-retest reliability in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention (WRAP)

Evidence suggests that higher levels of social activity are associated with better cognitive function and reduced Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Such activity represents a confluence of social support and verbal interaction, which likely influence cognition through mechanistically distinct pathways. However, a weakness in existing literature concerns the instruments and methods used to parse and quantify social data. Few efforts to separately assess social support and verbal interaction have been made. Moreover, previous longitudinal studies have used baseline social activity levels as a predictor for cognitive decline years later, assuming that activity remains constant; actual test-retest studies are rare and have not focused on older ages.

We created a novel verbal interaction measure and added it to an existing social support questionnaire in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention (WRAP). A subsample of WRAP participants, middle-aged and older adults enriched for family history of AD, participated in a test-retest study to determine 8-week stability (N=103) and two-year stability (N=137) of both social indicators, using weighted kappa coefficients. Secondary analyses will assess the reliability among key strata (age group [<70 and ≥70], sex, and cognitive ability) and those experiencing a major older-age life event (retirement or change in marital status). Results, to be presented at APHA, are expected to show a high degree of reliability (k >.60) for the short interval, and less reliability over the 2-year interval and in those experiencing life changes, and should provide important insight into the veracity of stability assumptions implicit in existing social and cognitive aging literature.