Table 1.
List of HCA definitions within the neuroscience, psychology, and gerontology fields.
| Reference | Proposed definition | Focus | Term defined |
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| 1.1 Neuroscience | |||
| Hendrie et al. (2006) | “Healthy cognitive aging is not just the absence of cognitive impairment, but the development and preservation of the multi-dimensional cognitive structures that allow the older adult to maintain social connectedness, and ongoing sense of purpose, and the abilities to function independently, to permit functional recovery from illness and injury, and to cope with residual cognitive deficits.” |
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| Daffner (2010) | “An alternative definition of normal cognitive aging suggests that it represents “non-pathological” aging, that is, older individuals without identifiable diseases or conditions (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease (AD), cerebral vascular disease) that negatively impact the central nervous system. However, many would argue that there is a continuum between normal and pathological cognitive aging.” |
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| Greenwood et al. (2011) | “Successful cognitive aging (refers to) maintaining intact cognitive functioning while living to late old age” |
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| Malaspina et al. (2011) | “Successful cognitive aging broadly refers to the multi-determined process of preserving cognitive abilities or exhibiting less-than-expected decline in neural structure and function typically associated with aging and its comorbidities.” |
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| Depp et al. (2012) | “An additional approach to operationalization would be to define success in reference to preservation of past performance—i.e., maintaining levels of cognitive performance attained at mid-life.” |
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| Dumas (2015, 2017) | “Normal aging has been defined as aging changes that occur in individuals free of overt diseases of the nervous system. The goal of successful aging is to maintain intact cognitive functioning all the way until death. Normal cognitive aging is not dementia and does not result in the loss of neurons, rather, there are changes in brain functioning” |
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| Wallace et al. (2017) | “Successful cognitive aging was defined as the absence of neurocognitive impairment (as defined by deficits in tasks of episodic learning, information processing speed, executive function, and motor skills) depression, and functional impairment (instrumental activities of daily living). |
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| Moore et al. (2018) | “Successful cognitive aging criteria (defined as the absence of objective neurocognitive deficits and subjective cognitive symptoms)” |
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| Stern et al. (2022) | “The use of a common vocabulary and operational definitions“(“… such as reserve and resilience…”) “will facilitate even greater progress in understanding the factors that are associated with successful aging” |
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| 1.2 Psychology | |||
| Harrison et al. (2012) | “SuperAgers were defined as individuals over age 80 with episodic memory performance at least as good as normative values for 50- to 65-year-olds.” |
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| Smith (2016) | “Aging with normal cognitive changes is defined by the subtle loss of cognitive and functional performance that occurs in normal aging, even when known brain diseases are absent” |
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| Silverman and Schmeidler (2018) | “Successful cognitive aging is intact cognition in the oldest-old; we define resistant successful cognitive aging as successful cognitive aging despite high risk.” |
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| Cabeza et al. (2018) | “Optimal aging defined as the situation in which cognitive abilities are preserved throughout aging. Healthy aging humans (defined here as aging in individuals who are apparently free of brain disease)” |
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| Leal and Yassa (2019) | “Normal is “conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.” Note that characterizations of normal versus abnormal in terms of pathology or illness are not the purpose of this chapter. In fact, the chapter does not attempt to characterize normal as a condition that is free of pathology (it is not) but merely as the typical or majority condition.” |
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| Oschwald et al. (2020) | “we refer to (healthy cognitive aging as the) processes that occurs in the absence of pathological cognitive impairments, as previous literature has not yet reached a consensus on the definition of healthy cognitive aging.” |
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| 1.3 Gerontology | |||
| Massaldjieva (2018) | “Normal Cognitive Aging: Cognitive aging allowing for active and independent living Successful Cognitive Aging: Maintenance of intact cognitive functioning all the way until death” |
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| Mendoza-Ruvalcaba et al. (2018) | “The concept of cognitive functioning in normal aging has been defined as the functioning of the cognitive system, either in adaptation or alteration, which can generate a regression or successful management of the functions of daily life in older adults” |
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| Cadar (2018) | “There is no clear consensus in defining healthy or successful cognitive aging, but it can be described as the maintenance of most cognitive abilities as until older age and a minimum variation in the spectrum of normal cognitive decline with aging.” |
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| Rowe and Kahn (1987) | “In many data sets that show substantial average decline with age, one can find older persons with minimal physiologic loss, or none at all, when compared to the average of their younger counterparts. These people might be viewed as having aged successfully with regard to the particular variable under study (…). They, in combination with people who show the typical nonpathological age-linked losses that we propose to designate usual, constitute the heterogeneous category of the normal (that is, nondiseased) in any age group.” |
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| Clouston et al. (2020) | “Normal Cognitive aging is generally characterized by a slow but steady decay in fluid cognition (Salthouse, 2019) resulting from a seemingly unavoidable biological process (Richards and Deary, 2014).” |
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