Grant: Catalyst Grant: Analysis of CLSA Data

As effective pharmacological strategies to protect against dementia remain elusive, behavioural strategies provide an alluring alternative. Indeed, engaging in regular physical activity (PA), avoiding excessive bouts of sedentary behaviour (SB), and improving sleep quality (SQ) may be cost-effective strategies to mitigate the deleterious effects of aging and disease on brain health. However, few studies have examined PA, SB and SQ together in order to determine whether they have independent or perhaps interactive effects on cognitive performance among adults. Furthermore, few studies have employed large, representative samples spanning a large age range from middle to late adulthood. This grant application proposes to employ the first wave of data collected from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) to better understand the effects of PA, SB and SQ on cognitive performance in aging women and men. The CLSA dataset provides a unique and powerful source to examine this topic due to its large, population-based sampling of women and men and wide age range, spanning from middle adulthood to late adulthood. This will allow us to determine whether: 1) PA, SB and SQ are associated with cognitive performance; 2) this association is evident in both women and men; and 3) these associations change from middle to older age. This analysis of sex and age as moderators will provide insight into who benefits most from PA-based interventions. In turn, this can lead to more efficient and targeted deployment of current healthy aging interventions and will also spur the developmental of alternative interventions for individuals for whom PA is less effective. The results of the proposed study will provide preliminary insight into whether PA-based interventions should concomitantly aim to reduce SB and improve SQ, and whether these types of interventions should be targeted to a certain period in the aging process and/or to one sex or the other.