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Abstract
Background While social support is associated with better cognitive health among cancer-free individuals, this relationship is understudied among cancer survivors. We investigated whether overall social support before and after a cancer diagnosis is related to post-diagnosis memory ageing, overall and by sex/gender.
Methods Data were from 2044 cancer survivors in the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS; n=1395) and English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA; n=649) from 2006 to 2018. Incident cancer diagnoses and memory function (immediate and delayed word recall) were assessed biennially. Social support was assessed every 4 years in the HRS and biennially in ELSA. We established three time points relative to a cancer diagnosis: pre-diagnosis (the wave prior to cancer diagnosis), time 1 post-diagnosis (the first wave after a cancer diagnosis) and time 2 post-diagnosis (the second wave after a cancer diagnosis). Multivariable-adjusted marginal structural models incorporating inverse probability of treatment and attrition weights estimated the relationship between overall social support and memory function post-diagnosis.
Results Prior to a cancer diagnosis, 45.1% of participants reported high social support. Cancer survivors reporting higher social support at time 2 had better memory function post-diagnosis than those with lower social support (0.14 SD units; 95% CI: 0.03 to 0.24) which was stronger among women (0.18 SD units; 95% CI: 0.02 to 0.34) than men (0.10 SD units; 95% CI: −0.03 to 0.24).
Conclusions Social support may help promote memory function after a cancer diagnosis in mid-to-later life. Further studies with a larger sample size and differentiation of social support are warranted.
- AGING
- COGNITION
- EPIDEMIOLOGY
- CHRONIC DI
Data availability statement
Data are available in a public, open access repository. Data from the Health and Retirement Study and English Longitudinal Study of Ageing are publicly available data.
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Data availability statement
Data are available in a public, open access repository. Data from the Health and Retirement Study and English Longitudinal Study of Ageing are publicly available data.
Footnotes
X @EpiKobayashi
Contributors AW is the guarantor. AW contributed to the conceptualisation, supervision, methodology, formal analysis, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing. XY contributed to the methodology, formal analysis and writing-review and editing. BO contributed to the formal analysis. LCK contributed to the supervision and writing–review and editing.
Funding This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging Pathway to Independence Award (K99 AG076532 to A.C. Westrick).
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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