Among the goals of this project are to describe age differences and changes in reasoning performance and to investigate processes underlying such age-related performance. Last year, concept problem solving, a measure of abstract reasoning, was one of many measures included in analyses relating cognitive performance to glucose tolerance in the women in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA). When age, education, and obesity were taken into account, only concept problem solving was related to the concentration of glucose in the blood two hours after ingestion of a glucose load. Further analyses were carried out for the women in the BLSA who were in their sixties and for these who were over 70. For the women who were in their sixties, better glucose regulation was associated with higher problem solving performance. When only the healthier women in their sixties were included, however, the relationship was substantially reduced. For the women over 70, problem solving performance was not related to the glucose tolerance measure either for the entire group or for the healthier subgroup. Among the women in the BLSA, evidence that glucose regulation affects abstract reasoning in the elderly is weak and inconsistent.
