Cardiovascular Disease and Cognition in Older Adult

Running head: CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE AND COGNITION IN OLDER ADULT 1
Cardiovascular Disease and Cognition in Older Adult
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CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE AND COGNITION IN OLDER ADULT 2
Cardiovascular Disease and Cognition in Older Adult
Introduction
In essence, the overall modification of an individual’s lifestyle factors is tipped to
improve vascular health and possibly reducing the risk of a rather cognitive decline in dementia
in the older adult. Apparently, modification of lifestyle factors including obesity, hypertension,
obesity, physical inactivity, depression, and smoking is like to reduce the overall prevalence of
Alzheimer’s diseases among the older adult. Given the recurrence of cardiovascular factor, there
are various models that have been developed that are aimed at predicting an individual’s risk of
cardiovascular diseases or stroke in future that is based on the combinations of risk factor
(D’agostino, Vasan, Pencina, Wolf, Cobain, M., Massaro, & Kannel, 2008). The aspect of
health-related co-morbidities among the older population has become highly prevalent in
contemporary society. In this light, the investigation on the effect of cardiovascular as well as
health-related risk factors on the overall cognitive function is, therefore, relevant to the
population particularly among the older adult (Stephan & Brayne, 2008). This paper intends to
discuss the general keywords that will be useful in finding the relevant article to the chosen topic
as well as describing and commenting on the search strategy that has been adopted.
Selection Criteria of Search terms and Search Strategy
Ideally, the review for this study is undertaken based on the PRISMA statement. As a
result, the combinations of the following terms were considered in the search process: “Vascular
risk”, “cardiovascular risk”, “cardiovascular health”, “stroke risk”, “ cognit*”, “dementia”,
“Framingham”, “CAIDE”, and “Alzheimer”. Notably, all these searches were restricted to those
articles that have been published in English. There is one article that was included that passed the
criteria of electronic search (SLH). As a result, the chosen articles in the review were included

CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE AND COGNITION IN OLDER ADULT 3
based on the following criteria: the overall examined cardiovascularly or rather the assessment
models of stroke risk, the details regarding cognitive test scores which were availed at two or
even more time points, and the average longitudinal population-based design of the study at
hand.
Search Strategies
One of the apparent search strategies that w applicable for this study was phrase
searching where it allows one to search for two or more words as a rather exact phrase. Unless
one assumes otherwise, most databases are set to assume the Boolean AND connector, meaning
that all searched words have to be presented for a specific record so that it can be listed in the
overall search results. When searching a phrase using this strategy, it is always advisable to
enclose a particular search term in quotes thus retrieving fewer terms. For instance, the review
used some specific terms phrases such as the “cardiovascular health” and “Vascular risk” thus
narrowing down to specific terms in the search engines. Additionally, the review included a
search technique called truncation that is often used in a database where a word ending is
replaced by a particular symbol. In this light, the symbol that was used was the asterisk (*)
(Kaffashian, Dugravot, Elbaz, Shipley, Sabia, Kivimäki, & Singh-Manoux, 2013). The use of
truncation technique was because it allows different forms of words to be searched
simultaneously. For instance, during the search, the term that was truncated was “cognit*” thus
giving room for more searches.
During the search, there were 56, 000 publications identified, which 2,087 were mainly
duplicates and thus after the titles as well as the abstracts were reviewed particularly for the
eligibility test, about 50 publications were retained for a full-text review (Norton S, Matthews
FE, Barnes DE, Yaffe K, & Brayne 2014). In total, about 8 publications met the criteria for