Dementia and Physical Disablement Processes among Aging Latinos Project Summary The Latino population is rapidly aging and by 2050 will represent over 20% of the older adult population in the U.S. At the same time, the burden of dementia in the older Latino population is expected to increase from around 200,000 cases in 2000 to as many as 1.3 million cases in 2050, with many more suffering from milder degrees of cognitive impairment. A further stress on the Latino and specifically Mexican-origin population is high poverty rates. Close to 27% of older Mexican Americans in the U.S. live below the poverty line which is over double the rate for older adults in general (Administration for Community Living, 2014). Disparities in dementia raise serious public health concerns; yet, there have been surprisingly few longitudinal studies on the role of dementia and cognitive impairment for physical disablement processes in the Mexican-origin population. Understanding how dementia shapes physical disablement pathways and identifying factors that slow down or speed up disablement will lead to a better understanding at which point geriatric public health intervention is most needed. We propose to employ a longitudinal cohort study of 3,050 older Mexican-origin individuals the 1993/94-2016/17 Hispanic Established Populations for the Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly (H-EPESE). First, we will use nine waves of survey data to 1) describe the long-term patterns of dementia and cognitive impairment for a prospective cohort of older Mexican Americans. Growth Mixture Modeling (GMM) is used for this part of the analysis. Then, we will 2) estimate the role of dementia and cognitive impairment for changes in physical disablement processes over twenty years of study data. Finally, we will 3) assess differences in dementia-related physical disablement within the group by gender, socioeconomic status, and sociocultural factors. The proposed research will lead to a better understanding of long-term health change for Mexican Americans in late life and an estimation of how many Mexican Americans with dementia need support in late life. Ultimately, our objective is to develop and evaluate a new empirical model to describe long-term patterns of dementia for physical disablement processes that can be replicated with other segments of the aging population to determine the extent of need for specialized long-term support services.
Currently, little is known about the nature of dementia-specific physical disablement processes for the rapidly growing and rapidly aging Mexican American population. We propose to utilize data from a cohort study of Mexican Americans and develop an innovative research design to examine heterogeneity in physical disablement processes and the role of dementia as these disablement processes unfold. The proposed study will advance knowledge of dementia-related physical disablement in the aging Latino population in the U.S. and highlight segments of this population that would greatly benefit from effective policy and program initiatives.
