The role of gender in informant reports of cognitive decline in the United States and Mexico.

OBJECTIVES: This study investigates the influence of respondents' and informants' gender on informants' assessments of cognitive functioning in population studies in the United States and Mexico. METHODS: Using data from the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS-HCAP) (N = 3,025) in the United States and the Mexican Cognitive Aging Study (Mex-Cog) (N = 1071) in Mexico, we examined informant reports of cognitive decline with 17 questions from the Community Screening Instrument for Dementia (CSI-D). Ordinary least squares regression was used to analyze the gender of respondents and informants in each country for the total CSI-D score and logistic regressions for each individual CSI-D question, controlling for correlates of direct and informant measures of cognition. RESULTS: There was no significant relationship between respondents' gender and total CSI-D reports in either country. Female informants in the United States reported 0.57 more CSI-D symptoms compared to male informants while in Mexico they reported 1.35 fewer symptoms. DISCUSSION: Our results show that informant gender is associated with systematically different reporting patterns depending on the national and cultural context in which the assessment takes place. The results suggest that informant reports of cognitive decline may represent social norms in addition to actual cognitive decline.