Development and assessment of analytic methods to improve the measurement of cognition in longitudinal studies of aging through the use of substudies with comprehensive neuropsychological testing

Regression modeling or confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) can be used to incorporate information from substudies with comprehensive neuropsychological testing into measures of cognition in broader aging surveys. Compared to a gold standard measure based on comprehensive neuropsychological testing, both approaches had lower mean squared error than existing comparison approaches. Associations with example risks were similar across all approaches, though estimated standard errors were most accurate for CFA models. The similarity across approaches may be due to the brevity of available cognitive assessments in the example dataset.