A – 12 Depression Predicts Executive Functioning Abilities in a Hispanic Alzheimer’s Disease Population

Objective We examined if depression predicted executive functioning abilities among an Alzheimer’s disease (AD) population. Method Twenty-five Hispanics with AD completed two executive functioning tasks and the Geriatric Depression Scale-15 (GDS-15) in Spanish. Pearson’s correlation coefficients were conducted to determine whether there was a significant relationship between executive functioning tasks (i.e., Similarities & Stroop Color Word Test Color-Word; SCWT-CW) and depression via GDS-15. Finally, a series of linear regressions were conducted to determine whether depression levels predicted executive functioning abilities. Results Linear regression analysis revealed significant correlations between depression and both executive functioning tasks. With a beta of -.53 (t = -2.96, p = .007), depression accounted for about 24% of variance in Similarities performance. Meanwhile, with a beta of -.47 (t = -2.57, p = .017), depression accounted for about 19% of variance in SCWT-CW performance. Conclusion Findings indicated that depression predicts executive functioning abilities. Meaning that it can be predicted that Hispanics diagnosed with AD with lower levels of depression are likely to have better executive functioning abilities. Evidence suggests bilingualism serves as a neuroprotective factor against cognitive decline. Future work could examine if depression can be a significant predictor among Spanish-English bilingual speakers compared to Spanish monolingual speakers with AD.