Caring in the time of COVID-19, longitudinal trends in well-being and mental health in carers in Ireland: Evidence from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA).

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 resulted in the older population being asked to remain at home and avoid other people outside their household. This could have implications for both receipt and provision of informal caring. OBJECTIVE: To determine if informal care provision by older carers changed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic from pre-pandemic care and if this was associated with a change in mental health and well-being of carers. DESIGN AND SETTING: Longitudinal nationally representative study of community dwelling adults from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) (Waves 3-COVID-Wave 6). METHODS: We studied a cohort of 3670 adults aged ≥60 in Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic (July-November 2020) and compared with previous data collections from the same cohort between 2014-2018. Independent variables were caregiving status and caregiving intensity, outcome measures included depressive symptoms (CES-D8), Perceived Stress (PSS4) and Quality of life (CASP12). Mixed models adjusting for socio-demographics and physical health were estimated. RESULTS: Caregiving increased from 8.2% (2014) to 15.4% (2020). Depression, and stress scores increased while quality of life decreased for all participants. Carers reported poorer mental health, and higher caring hours were associated with increased depression and stress and decreased quality of life scores on average, and increased depression was higher for women. CONCLUSIONS: Informal caregiving increased during the pandemic and family caregivers reported increased adverse mental health and well-being and this continued throughout the early months of the pandemic. The disproportionate burden of depression was highest in women providing higher caring hours.

Verbal intelligence is a more robust cross-sectional measure of cognitive reserve than level of education in healthy older adults.

BACKGROUND: Cognitive reserve is most commonly measured using socio-behavioural proxy variables. These variables are easy to collect, have a straightforward interpretation, and are widely associated with reduced risk of dementia and cognitive decline in epidemiological studies. However, the specific proxies vary across studies and have rarely been assessed in complete models of cognitive reserve (i.e. alongside both a measure of cognitive outcome and a measure of brain structure). Complete models can test independent associations between proxies and cognitive function in addition to the moderation effect of proxies on the brain-cognition relationship. Consequently, there is insufficient empirical evidence guiding the choice of proxy measures of cognitive reserve and poor comparability across studies. METHOD: In a cross-sectional study, we assessed the validity of 5 common proxies (education, occupational complexity, verbal intelligence, leisure activities, and exercise) and all possible combinations of these proxies in 2 separate community-dwelling older adult cohorts: The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA; N = 313, mean age = 68.9 years, range = 54-88) and the Cognitive Reserve/Reference Ability Neural Network Study (CR/RANN; N = 234, mean age = 64.49 years, range = 50-80). Fifteen models were created with 3 brain structure variables (grey matter volume, hippocampal volume, and mean cortical thickness) and 5 cognitive variables (verbal fluency, processing speed, executive function, episodic memory, and global cognition). RESULTS: No moderation effects were observed. There were robust positive associations with cognitive function, independent of brain structure, for 2 individual proxies (verbal intelligence and education) and 16 composites (i.e. combinations of proxies). Verbal intelligence was statistically significant in all models. Education was significant only in models with executive function as the cognitive outcome variable. Three robust composites were observed in more than two-thirds of brain-cognition models: the composites of (1) occupational complexity and verbal intelligence, (2) education and verbal intelligence, and (3) education, occupational complexity, and verbal intelligence. However, no composite had larger average effects nor was more robust than verbal intelligence alone. CONCLUSION: These results support the use of verbal intelligence as a proxy measure of CR in cross-sectional studies of cognitively healthy older adults.

[Prosody and reading: Temporal and melodic characteristics in the dyslexic child in reading and narration]. / Prosodie et lecture: particularités temporelles et mélodiques de l'enfant dyslexique en lecture et en narration.

Dyslexia is widely associated to a massive phonological awareness deficit. This deficit leads to difficulties in grapheme to phoneme conversions in reading and difficulties in words and sentences productions. The origin of the phonological deficit is partially explained by the magnocellular, cerebellar and articulatory theories. Recently, an increasing number of studies demonstrated the relationship between prosody and reading and, more specifically, the potential key role of suprasegmental phonology in the healthy development of phonological representations. The aim of this study is to explore part of prosodic features in dyslexics and normal developing children in reading and narration tasks, in French. We examined reading accuracy, reading rate, pauses frequency and duration, inter-pausal units (IPUs) duration and instantaneous variations of F0. Results show correct decoding skills for all subjects but a lack of automation of this procedure for dyslexics. Differences in pauses frequency and duration, IPUS duration and F0 variations observed between dyslexics and controls confirm the link between prosodic reading and automaticity. The longer pause duration in narrative form a temporal feature of dyslexic's production. This temporal characteristic reflects the cognitive cost done by a speech generation task involving lexical selection, syntactic planning and articulatory programming processes. This result is a first step towards evidence of a suprasegmental phonological deficit in spoken language that could be an early marker of later reading difficulties.