Leveraging the HRS to Understand Disparities in Dementia by Education Level

Educational attainment is the largest non-biological risk factor for dementia. Short of medical innovation, reducing risk and improving management among those with low education will lead to the greatest reduction in the population dementia burden. The reasons why dementia risk varies so strongly by educational attainment remain poorly understood. This gap in knowledge limits our understanding of what practical interventions would be most effective in reducing disparities in dementia risk across education groups. In this project, I will apply rigorous counterfactual statistical approaches on existing national-level data to identify the major pathways through which disparities in dementia by educational attainment arise. I do so by leveraging recent enhancements to the NIA-funded Health and Retirement Study (HRS) including the collection of genetic information, clinical assessments, life-course histories, and improved cognitive evaluations. These enhancements remain an under-used resource in dementia research. The value of this project is to provide a first rigorous treatment of the multiple life-course pathways that produce dementia disparities by educational attainment at a national level with the goal of identifying practical intervention points