Age trajectories of everyday cognition in African American and White older adults under prompted and unprompted conditions.

This was a secondary analysis of trial data, not a randomised test of prompting as a treatment. Attrition was large: at year 10, 1110 participants remained, and 1876 of 2779 baseline participants lacked an OTDL score. Participants who dropped out had lower everyday cognition scores on average. The sample was screened to be relatively healthy and non-demented. It does not show what happens in people with dementia or severe functional impairment. African American participants had lower raw unprompted scores and received more prompts, which may partly explain why prompting appeared to help them more. The study adjusted for education and vocabulary, but it cannot show why race-related trajectory differences occurred or that prompts caused the change. The parent ACTIVE cognitive training effects on everyday cognition had little-to-no evidence, but intervention group membership was only statistically controlled, not removed.

Do not read prompting as a treatment that closes race differences in everyday cognition. The prompts were part of the assessment, not a randomised intervention, and the adjusted mean race difference was not significant.