Health and Financial Literacy and the Acquisition of COVID-19 Knowledge in Older Adults

Overview

Journal J Appl Gerontol

Specialties Geriatrics
Infectious Diseases

Date 2024 Jun 17

PMID 38884370

Authors

Christopher C Stewart

Lei Yu

Maeve Byrne

Crystal M Glover

David A Bennett

Patricia A Boyle

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Knowledge about COVID-19 enters into many aspects of decision making, especially for older people who are at increased risk of severe disease or death. Yet little is known about the resources that supported older people's uptake of COVID-19 knowledge. Here, we hypothesized that higher pre-pandemic health and financial literacy was associated with higher COVID-19 knowledge. Participants were 434 community-based older people without dementia. COVID-19 knowledge was assessed via a 5-item measure, and health and financial literacy was assessed via a 32-item measure. In an ordinal regression model adjusted for age, gender, and education, higher literacy was associated with higher COVID-19 knowledge ( < .0001), and this association persisted after further adjusting for robust measures of global cognition or one of five specific cognitive domains (all ≤ .0001). These findings suggest that literacy plays a key role in supporting older people's acquisition of impactful knowledge in the real world.

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