UC San Francisco

“Duration of life-course poverty impacts cognitive performance: an NLSY79 sequence analysis”

ABSTRACT

Poverty is a persistent lived experience amongst much of the US population with negative effects on cognitive health. We estimate associations of poverty timing and duration as a potential determinant of midlife cognitive performance using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) cohort data. We quantified differences between individual-level poverty trajectories from ages 20 – 45 using sequence analysis and grouped similar trajectories using cluster analysis. A composite measure of cognitive performance included measures of immediate and delayed word recall, serial 7 subtractions and backwards counting. We performed multivariate linear regression analyses to assess the association between life course poverty trajectories and midlife cognitive performance and adjusted for race, sex, and birthplace. There were seven life course poverty trajectories represented in the NLSY79 data: no poverty; little poverty earlier; extended poverty earlier; persistent poverty earlier; persistent poverty later; extended poverty later; persistent poverty. Longer poverty duration was associated with poorer cognitive performance among middle age adults, but there was little evidence that timing of poverty during the life course impacted cognitive performance.