Heavy caring responsibilities may hasten cognitive decline

Onerous caring responsibilities reduce brain function for people aged 50 and over, whereas light caring duties can actually be beneficial to middle-aged and older people's mental abilities, finds a new study led by University College London. For the study, published in Age and Ageing, the researchers used 2004–05 to 2021–23 data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), a long-running, UCL-led nationally representative survey that gathers a wide range of information from around 20,000 people aged 50 and older in England who are re-interviewed every two years.