Association between balance impairment and incidence of motoric cognitive risk syndrome in the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study

Objectives: Motor cognitive risk (MCR) syndrome, defined as the cooccurrence of subjective cognitive complaints and a slow gait speed, is a form of pre-dementia condition. Balance has previously been associated with cognitive function. However, to date, no study has examined the relationship between balance and MCR in a large cohort of older adults. We aimed to investigate the associations of balance with MCR among Chinese older adults. Research design and methods: Data from the wave 1 to wave 3 of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) were used. Balance was measured using validated tandem stance. Logistic and discrete-time survival cox regression analyses were performed to examine the relationship between baseline balance impairment and prevalent and incident MCR. Results: A total of 3,398 participants were included in the baseline study. The prevalence of balance impairment was 21.1%. In the cross-sectional analysis, balance impairment was significantly associated with higher odds of MCR in the fully-adjusted model (OR: 1.43 95%CI 1.14-1.80, p = 0.002). A total of 2,474 individuals were included in the longitudinal analysis. During a mean follow-up duration of 3.69 years, the incidence of MCR was 9.8%. Baseline balance impairment was also significantly related to incidence of MCR (HR:1.37 95%CI 1.03-1.82, p = 0.032) even adjusting all confounders. Conclusion: These results show that early recognition of balance disorder may be helpful in the prevention and treatment of cognitive decline in older adults. (c) 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS on behalf of SERDI Publisher. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).