Accelerated Cognitive Function Decline in Community-Dwelling Older Adults during COVID-19 Pandemic: The Korean Frailty and Aging Cohort Study (KFACS)

Jaehoon Jung; Sunyoung Kim; Byungsung Kim; Miji Kim; Jisoo Yang; Dongmin Chung; Changwon Won

doi:10.3390/ijerph191710666

Accelerated Cognitive Function Decline in Community-Dwelling Older Adults during COVID-19 Pandemic: The Korean Frailty and Aging Cohort Study (KFACS)

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Aug 26;19(17):10666. doi: 10.3390/ijerph191710666.

Authors

Jaehoon Jung¹, Sunyoung Kim², Byungsung Kim², Miji Kim³, Jisoo Yang², Dongmin Chung¹, Changwon Won⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Family Medicine, Kyung Hee University Medical Center, Seoul 02477, Korea.
² Department of Family Medicine, College of Medicine, Kyung Hee University, Seoul 02477, Korea.
³ Department of Biomedical Science and Technology, College of Medicine/East-West Medical Research Institute, Kyung Hee University, Seoul 02477, Korea.
⁴ Elderly Frailty Research Center, Department of Family Medicine, College of Medicine, Kyung Hee University, Seoul 02477, Korea.

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on cognitive function of community-dwelling elderly individuals. Five-year (2016 to 2020) longitudinal data of the Korea Frailty and Aging Cohort Study (KFACS) were used. There were 1559 participants in 2016 and 1455 in 2017 aged 72-84 years. Follow-up was conducted at two-year intervals. We selected participants from the database of the 2017 and 2018 surveys for intergroup comparison over 2-year follow-ups. The number of study patients in the 2017-Group was 1027 and that of the 2018-Group was 879. In the intergroup comparison, the mean difference of word list memory score from 2018 to 2020 was -0.14, while that from 2017 to 2019 was 0.53. The mean difference of word list recall score from 2018 to 2020 was -0.25, while that from 2017 to 2019 was 0.03. These were significant even after adjusting confounding variables. In the intragroup comparison, the word list memory and recall scores from 2018 to 2020 were more decreased than those from 2016 to 2018. Conclusively, cognitive function of the Korean elderly cohort declined much more during the COVID-19 pandemic than before the pandemic, particularly in terms of memory and recall function.

Keywords: COVID-19; Korea; aged; cognition.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Aged
Aging / psychology
COVID-19* / epidemiology
Cognition
Cohort Studies
Cross-Sectional Studies
Frailty*
Humans
Independent Living
Pandemics
Republic of Korea / epidemiology

Grants and funding

This study was funded by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Republic of Korea (grant number: HI15C3153). This study was supported by a grant from the Korea Health Technology R&D Project through the Korean Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI) and the Research Program funded by the National Institute of Health, Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (2021-ER0605-00).