Daily difficulties linked to mortality within cognitive stages
Three-year mortality with none versus all four difficulties was 21.0% versus 41.0% at cognitive stage 1 and 26.8% versus 59.0% at stage 3.
202,508 participants
Limit: Comorbidity, nutrition, and medication data were unavailable, leaving likely confounding
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
In a retrospective observational cohort study, researchers analyzed 202,508 adults aged 65 or older with cognitive impairment in Taiwan’s disability registry between 2012 and 2024. Participants were at stages 1–3 on the Clinical Dementia Rating scale, which rates cognitive impairment. Researchers linked assessments of everyday difficulties to death records.
Four difficulties had the strongest independent links to mortality: rising from sitting, concentrating for 10 minutes, understanding speech and standing for 30 minutes. Researchers counted each difficulty when it was rated at least moderate. Within every cognitive stage, three-year mortality roughly doubled between people with none and those with all four. Over a median follow-up of 2.43 years, 96,130 participants (47.5%) died.
Why it matters
For older adults with cognitive impairment, the findings bear on how to assess life expectancy beyond a measure of cognitive severity.
Caveats
The four questions were selected for their mortality associations in the same observational cohort, which cannot establish cause and effect. The preprint has not been peer-reviewed, and its findings concern adults aged 65 or older with cognitive impairment in Taiwan’s disability registry.
From the paper
- Follow-up
Over a median 2.43 years, 96,130 (47.5%) died.
Quoted word for word from the full text on researchsquare.com.
- Cognitive impairment
- Clinical Dementia Rating
- Difficulty rising from sitting
- Difficulty concentrating for 10 minutes
- Difficulty understanding speech
- Humans
The paper
Chung Shan Medical University; I-Shou University
Research Square, Oct 23, 2026, Open access, Preprint, not peer-reviewed
