Cumulative Life Course Adversity and Cognition: Investigation of this Association and its Underlying Mechanisms

The association between adversity and cognition varies according to the specific adversity, when the adversity was experienced, and the cognitive domains investigated. Disentangling the effect of one type of adversity and the underlying mechanistic pathway is therefore difficult.The association between one type of adversity accumulated over the life course (i.e., maltreatment) and executive function (i.e., cognitive flexibility), as well as two mechanisms that may underlie this association were investigated.A path analysis was performed on the baseline population of the UK Biobank study (N = 73,489, Mdnage = 56, SDage = 7.63, 55.74% of women).Higher cumulative adverse experiences were associated with lower performance in cognitive flexibility and this effect was partly mediated by the level of depression.The association between cumulative life course adversity, depression, and performance in cognitive flexibility has been highlighted as well as the specificity of these findings to the cumulative effect of life course adversity.