Kaiser Healthy Aging and Diverse Life Experiences Study and Study of Healthy Aging in African Americans are a racially/ethnically diverse cohort (18% Asian, 47% Black, 17% Latinx, 21% White) reporting volunteering within 12 months prior to baseline. Late-life (55+ years) volunteering is associated with better executive function (β = 0.173, 95% confidence interval CI: 0.114-0.232) and verbal episodic memory (β = 0.132, 95% CI: 0.071-0.192) after adjusting for age, gender/sex, education, race/ethnicity, instrumental activities of daily living, and self-rated health. Volunteering in late life, a few times per week, is associated with the highest magnitude of executive function (β = 0.216, 95% CI: 0.128-0.305) and once per week with verbal episodic memory (β = 0.189, 95% CI: 0.082-0.297) versus no volunteering, but the magnitude did not increase with more frequent volunteering. Those who volunteered had similar domain-specific cognitive decline compared to those who did not.
Lor et al. (Thu,) studied this question.