The relationship between mobility and cognition in older adults in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging

Maintaining mobility, or the ability to move around safely and independently, is of paramount importance in aging. Unfortunately, mobility impairments are extremely prevalent in older adults. These impairments are associated with a cascade of other limiting factors such as increased isolation, falls, hospitalizations and an overall decrease in quality of life. More recently, research has shown that mobility is also linked to cognition in older adults. For example, it has been shown that older adults with good physical balance and walking speed also perform better on tests of memory and reasoning. However, both mobility and cognition encompass a multitude of subdomains, and the relationships among them are not well understood. The aim of this project is to use data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging to better understand the relationship between mobility and cognition in older adults.

Our results indicated that cognitive measures were significantly associated with mobility measures. Further, age significantly moderated the mobility-cognition relationship, with the strength of the associations generally increasing with age. Importantly, all cognitive measures were related to indices of mobility, suggesting a global association. However, the small effect sizes observed suggest that mobility is, in isolation, not a strong correlate of cognitive performance in middle and late-adulthood.