MBA Chart of the Week: Regression-Adjusted Age Profile of Memory Measures

By 2024 the number of Americans over the age of 65 will grow to nearly 62 million from 45 million in 2014.   

The Research Institute for Housing America’s Special Report on Cognition and the Housing Behavior of Older Americans by Gary Engelhardt (https://www.mba.org/Documents/Research/RIHA/15865_RIHA_Cognition_Report.pdf) finds that typical declines in memory and cognition are associated with substantial increases in difficulty with managing money; a new diagnosis of memory disease, in particular, is associated with very large increases in such difficulty.  

This week’s chart shows the profile of Americans by age for several memory measures: immediate word recall, delayed word recall and serial sevens, respectively. Serial sevens, the number of times the respondent can count backward from 100 by 7 (measured on the right-hand vertical axis), declines steadily with age. The number of words recalled out of 10 is measured on the left-hand vertical axis. The immediate word recall measure begins to decline in the late 70s; delayed word recall appears to get better with age, until about age 80, then declines.  

Given these challenges, the industry may need to evaluate how best to serve seniors. The report finds that declines in memory and cognition are associated with an increase in mortgage delinquency, especially for older women.  

To view the Chart of the Week, click https://www.mba.org/news-research-and-resources/forecasts-data-and-reports/forecasts-and-commentary/chart-of-the-week.  

(Lynn Fisher is vice president of research and economics with the Mortgage Bankers Association; she can be reached at lfisher@mba.org. Joel Kan associate vice president of economic forecasting with MBA; he can be reached at jkan@mba.org.)