Social-support buffers the effect of internalized homonegativity on intrusive sexual thoughts/behaviors.

Objective: Among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, intrusive sexual thoughts/behaviors (i.e., distress about one's sexual urges or behaviors) are associated with depression and engagement in behavior that increases the risk for sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

The Intersecting Effects of Lifetime Experiences of Homelessness and Incarceration on Cognitive Aging and Dementia Risk Factors in the United States.

Background And Objectives: Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) remain a pressing concern in the US, which also has one of the highest incarceration rates worldwide. Existing research has analyzed dementia risk and care among currently incarcerated and homeless populations; this paper fills a gap by examining later-life cognitive disparities facing formerly incarcerated and/or homeless individuals.

Research Design And Methods: Using Health and Retirement Study data (HRS; 1998-2018), we tested whether formerly homeless and/or incarcerated people had earlier onset of cognitive decline, and whether they were more likely to have modifiable risk factors for ADRD than those without such experiences.

Inequalities in accelerated cognitive decline: Resolving observational window bias using nested non-linear regression.

Introduction: Limited observational windows lead to conflicting results in studies examining educational differences in Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) risk, due to observational window bias relative to onset of accelerated cognitive decline. This study tested a novel model to address observational window bias and tested for the presence and sources of disparities in accelerated cognitive declines due to ADRD.

Methods: The sample examined 167,314 cognitive assessments from 32,441 Health and Retirement Study participants.

Cognitive Decline After Divorce and Widowhood: Is Marital Loss Always a Loss?

Background And Objectives: We used longitudinal data to determine whether the type of marital loss is associated with the rate of cognitive change before and after divorce or widowhood. Previous research found that relationship status was associated with older adults' cognitive performance: married persons performed better on memory assessments and had lower dementia risk than unmarried-cohabitating, never-married, divorced, and widowed persons. However, the end of a marriage may cause distress or reduce distress because a stressor disappears.

Social inequalities and the early provision and dispersal of COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States: A population trends study.

Background: In December 2020 the U.S. began a massive COVID-19 vaccination campaign, an action that researchers felt could catalyze inequalities in COVID-19 vaccination utilization.

Obesity in Late-Life as a Protective Factor Against Dementia and Dementia-Related Mortality.

Objective: We estimated the conversion from cognitively normal to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to probable dementia and death for underweight, normal, overweight, and obese older adults, where the timing of examinations is associated with the severity of dementia.

Methods: We analyzed six waves of the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS). Body mass (BMI) was computed from height and weight.

Quantifying Healthy Aging in Older Veterans Using Computational Audio Analysis.

Background: Researchers are increasingly interested in better methods for assessing the pace of aging in older adults, including vocal analysis. The present study sought to determine whether paralinguistic vocal attributes improve estimates of the age and risk of mortality in older adults.

Methods: To measure vocal age, we curated interviews provided by male U.

Cognitive Aging in Same- and Different-Sex Relationships: Comparing Age of Diagnosis and Rate of Cognitive Decline in the Health and Retirement Study.

Introduction: The ongoing marginalization of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people has been hypothesized to produce poorer late-in-life cognitive outcomes, according to mechanisms posited by minority stress and allostatic load theories. Yet the existence of those outcomes remains understudied, and results of existing studies have been contradictory. Using a population-based longitudinal aging study, this paper will compare age at diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) or a related dementia and rates of cognitive decline between participants in same-sex relationships (SSRs) and different-sex relationships (DSRs).

Ask Again: Including Gender Identity in Longitudinal Studies of Aging.

Information on transgender people's health, and especially their experiences of aging, is lacking, including from major longitudinal studies of aging like the Health and Retirement Study and its sister studies in the Gateway to Global Aging Data project. This paper surveys the state of gender data collection among major longitudinal studies and finds that all but one fail to collect adequate information on participants' gender to determine participants' gender identities. It identifies the unique challenges that population-wide longitudinal data collection poses to current best practices for identifying transgender survey participants and proposes a modified "two-question model": one question for sex assigned at birth and a second for gender identity, both of which offer 3 responses.