Cognitive Aging: The Role of Environment and Genetics Paper Example

Introduction

Cognitive function is a major factor that determines self-care ability in the aged persons. Studies have adequately examined age-related decline in cognitive performances that constituted the greatest threats people's abilities to live independently. Findings from these studies have reported that cognitive function can be influenced by environmental and genetic factors. In particular, studies such as Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging (SATSA) and Older Australian Twin Study (OATS) used classical twin methods to estimate environmental and genetic contributions to cognitive performances. Their findings revealed that genetics and environmental factors contribute significantly to cognitive aging. Therefore, these paper reports findings from two studies that examined genetics and environmental factors on cognitive aging.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Reasons Why the Research Is Interesting

Cognition entails numerous mental abilities and processes ranging from learning, attention, retention, problem-solving, memory and decision making while cognitive aging entails an age-related decline in a persons' ability to think, find solutions to problems and reason logically. As a person's life expectancy proliferates, preserving his or her cognitive prowess becomes cardinal to ensuring the quality of the supplementary years. Therefore, it is this growing unrest that the two studies on cognitive aging significant and a public health concern from numerous standpoints. These studies are important because they assist people to understand how their memories and decision making abilities work as they begin to grow old. Secondly, given that the aging population is rapidly increasing in certain parts of the globe, these studies help to understand what is known on cognitive aging and identify any positive steps to maintain and improve people's cognitive wellbeing and identify measures to execute those changes.

What Researchers Are Trying To Achieve

The researchers of the two articles are trying to prove that genetics and environment play a significant role in cognitive aging of an individual. Previous studies have explored the correlation between environmental factors and cognitive aging. Nonetheless, no study has investigated the effects of environmental factors and genetics on cognitive aging despite such relationships. Therefore, these researchers seek to validate the fact that environmental factors and genetics play a critical role in cognitive aging. By having access to repeat measures of cognitive data across various sample groups, these investigators managed to examine the effects of environmental factors and genetics on the performance levels of aging persons. More importantly, the researchers are proving that it is possible to extensively harmonize projects and get accurate and reliable results that as opposed to smaller individual projects.

Appropriateness of Research Methodology to Answer Research Questions

The methodology section of a research paper should offer a succinct statement regarding the selected study approach. The authors of the two articles failed to clearly state whether they selected qualitative or quantitative study approaches to answer their research questions. Further, they failed to describe, explore or assess any philosophical orientation, framework, research paradigm, ideological foundations or theories that relate to the studies they were conducting. Undoubtedly, qualitative and quantitative research methodologies are complex, vast and full of myriad theoretical models and methodological frameworks and thus there are numerous ways in which qualitative and quantitative research principles are used in research projects. Therefore, it is apparent that these two articles seriously lacked methodological transparency and explanation that limited their ability to answer research questions appropriately.

Secondly, authors of the two articles used purposive convenience sampling to select participants. While this technique was convenient for the researchers, it implied that the participants were not the most suitable for the study. In the two studies, the participants comprised of monozygotic twins and dizygotic same-sex twins, as well as, dizygotic opposite-sex twins. However, no explanation is provided regarding why these participants decided to participate in the study while others declined. This would imply that there was some biasness in answering research questions because it appears that these researchers selected their preferred participants. In one of the articles, data was collected through interviews but the researchers failed to explain whether the participants were in groups or individual. By interviewing participants as a group, some participants may conform to responses of others thus influencing the study results as well as answers to the research questions. The methodologies adopted in the two studies are vague because they do not clearly explain how data were collected and specific techniques used and reasons for using them. These could cause bias answers to research questions. The researchers failed to justify reasons for using the techniques they adopted. Therefore, proving a rationale would assist in ensuring validity in the research process and results thus ensuring that research questions are answered appropriately.

The Most Important Results

The most important results from these articles are the variations of age differences in levels of environmental and genetic influences varied across the test. This implies that the effects of genetic and environments on cognitive functions of persons differ across childhood and adulthood based on the tests administered to the participants

The Implication of Results in Nonprofessional Language

In a non-professional language, these results mean that environment and gene affect the way people of different ages reason and understand things around them. From these results, it is clear that adults are likely to lose their cognitive abilities during their later years. However, the magnitude of the stated loss depends on the environment and their genetic composition.

The relationship between Results and Title Topic

Results from these articles provide substantial evidence that numerous genetic and environmental factors contribute to and influence the way people age cognitively. Intuitively, these results imply that environmental contexts and experiences, most of which people actively select, are essential for cognitive maintenance and may set courses towards improved or worse cognitive maintenance during old age. Moreover, some persons may be sensitive to given environmental settings as compared to others based on genetic factors that jointly mitigate or facilitate cognitive change. Therefore, these results relate to topic by clearly explaining the primary dynamics of health, cognition, and wellbeing and possibly evaluate means through which environment and gene act and interact across and within developmental periods to establish the cognitive aging results.

Strong and Weak Points of the Research

The strengths of these studies encompass the longitudinal design of various ages, extensive cognitive testing, as well as, genetically informative design with monozygotic twins, dizygotic same-sex twins, and dizygotic opposite-sex twins. However, each study has unique and potential weaknesses. First, in a study by Pahlen et al. (2018), there was no statistical evidence in study heterogeneity in twin similarity, thus yielding poor results. Similarly, twin samples were obtained from well developed nations, and this would affect the generalizability of the study findings. In one study, not all the six tests that were being investigated were conducted in the stipulated studies. Besides, they did not measure all the cognitive functions associated with aging. As such, it was difficult for researchers to harmonize a valid measure of general cognitive ability. One of the weak points in a study by Xu et al. (2015) is that the sample size was extremely small. Besides, the sample of twins selected had relatively young age. In addition, the twins used in the study had overall low levels of education as compared to those from developed nations. Moreover, the questionnaire was copied directly from Western design and it is reported that this created difficulty in understanding and communication during the interview process.

Next Steps in This Research

The first implication for these studies is that results concerning the connection between childhood social class and later life cognitive abilities need to be taken into account. For a fact, efforts to balance health inequalities connected to cognition cannot neglect genetic susceptibility and paths of the environment and gene relationship, that implies that more attentive early individualized interventions need to be directed towards a minority or less privileged persons. Another next step is to extend the analysis to longitudinal data to investigate intraindividual variability across time and age. Besides, there is a need to examine the potential birth cohorts ignored here in the subsequent studies. More importantly, to comprehensively understand mechanisms affecting the differential developmental pathways for particular cognitive measures, future studies should examine possible environment-gene interactions.

Specific Issues That One Article Brings To the Other

Principally, an article by Pahlen et al. (2018) tries to bring convergence on the role of genetics and environment on cognitive aging, a topic also examined by Xu et al. (2015) and is faced with discrepant results. By highlighting the benefit of exploring specific cognitive traits across age since environmental and genetic influences vary by measure, this study brings the convergence between the relationship that exists between environment, gene, and cognitive function in twin aging that is already documented. Lastly, an article by Pahlen et al. (2018) brings the fact that it is possible to conduct extensive harmonization studies that can offer valid and informative results.Other Things That Can Be Told About the Topic

The studies reviewed herein have explained factors such as genetics; lifestyle, education, expertise, fitness, and occupation affect the path of cognition from young to old adulthood. However, one thing that should be told about this topic is that the causal nexus between these factors and cognitive aging is very complex. Principally, it should be understood that complex phenotypes including communication, behaviors, brain function and brain structure often result from a complex nexus of several inputs from environmental and genetic sources. There are numerous processes such as RNA, DNA, protein products and synaptic clefts, all of which influenced by various other elements within the system. Therefore, epigenetic influences, gene-environment, and gene-gene interactions together with relationships are all complexities that present numerous problems in understanding cognitive aging, as well as, genetics of brain.

References

Pahlen, S., Hamdi, N. R., Aslan, A. K. D., Horwitz, B. N., Panizzon, M. S., Petersen, I., ... & Gatz, M. (2018). Age-moderation of genetic and environmental contributions to cognitive functioning in mid-and late-life for specific cognitive abilities. Intelligence, 68, 70-81.

Xu, C., Sun, J., Duan, H., Ji, F., Tian, X., Zhai, Y., ... & Li, S. (2015). Gene, environment and cognitive function: a Chinese twin aging study. Age and aging, 44(3), 452-457.