Research Paper Advance Articles
Neurocognitive disparities: investigating ethnicity and mental health in rural aging adults
- 1 Department of Psychological Science, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79410, USA
- 2 Department of Psychology, University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, OK 73034, USA
- 3 Garrison Institute on Aging, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock, TX 79430, USA
- 4 Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, School of Medicine, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock, TX 79430, USA
Received: May 10, 2024 Accepted: November 4, 2024 Published: November 27, 2024
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.206166How to Cite
Copyright: © 2024 Fadalla et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Objectives: We explored whether depression and anxiety moderated the association of ethnicity and neurocognitive functioning among a sample of Hispanic and non-Hispanic White rural aging adults.
Method: 1,462 rural dwelling adults (Mage = 59.4 years, SDage = 12.12) were included in the analysis for this study.
Results: MANCOVAs revealed a significant (ps < .001) multivariate effect of ethnicity on all five indices of neurocognitive functioning when controlling for anxiety and sociodemographic variables (V = .20, F(5,1,310) = 64.69) and depression and sociodemographic variables in the second model (V = .20, F(5,1310) = 65.80, p < .001). There was also a multivariate effect of anxiety (V = .02, F(5,1310) = 4.57, p < .001) and depression (V = .04, F(5, 1310) = 11.38, p < .001) on neurocognitive functioning when controlling for sociodemographic variables and ethnicity.
Conclusion: Findings revealed that Hispanic rural aging adults scored lower on neurocognitive functioning compared to non-Hispanic White rural aging adults, irrespective of depression or anxiety. Depression and anxiety contributed to lower scores on neurocognitive functioning—yet this finding was not as robust. Culturally tailored interventions targeting risk factors for neurocognitive impairment in Hispanic rural aging adults are imperative to mitigate neurocognitive disparities. One possible reason for differences in neurocognitive functioning between Hispanic individuals and non-Hispanic individuals is stress as ethnic health disparities have been found to be shaped by a diverse range of lifetime stressors that are disproportionally exacerbated for ethnic minorities.