How well eight-year-old score on a test of thinking skills may be a predictor of how they will perform on tests of thinking and memory skills when they are 70 years old, according to a study published October 30, 2019 in Neurology. Education level and socioeconomic status were also predictors of thinking and memory performance. The study involved 502 people all born during the same week in 1946 in Great Britain who took cognitive tests when they were eight years old. Between the ages of 69 and 71, participants took thinking and memory tests again.
One test, similar to a test they completed as children, involved looking at various arrangements of geometric shapes and identifying the missing piece from five options. Other tests evaluated skills like memory, attention, orientation and language. Participants had positron emission tomography (PET) scans to see if they had amyloid-beta…
