While the study pool started large, by the end of the seven years, 1,600 people had withdrawn from the in-person study, and 2,259 were excluded from the final data due to failure to complete the study in one way or another. However, out of those that were not included, 178 were later diagnosed with dementia.
Additionally, the gait and cognitive state of each participant was not measured at the same time, making it difficult to concretely determine their correlation to each other.
It may be apparent that cognitive decline is connected with dementia, but the study accounted for this by explaining, “It is to be expected that longitudinal decline in cognitive performance is strongly associated with dementia, as the former is a diagnostic criterion for the latter. By presenting specific comparisons between dual decline and cognitive decline groupings in this study, we have been able to specifically illustrate the additional benefit of a combined gait-cognition measure, beyond cognitive testing alone.”
