Speaker

Alein Haro-Ramos
Assistant Professor of Health, Society, & Behavior
University of California, Irvine

Abstract

Work shapes not only economic security but long-term health, including the trajectory of cognitive aging. For Latino adults—who face elevated risk for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias and are disproportionately concentrated in service, manufacturing, and construction jobs with limited schedule control—occupational exposures may be an underrecognized driver of this disparity. Shift work, in particular, may compound risk through chronic circadian disruption, yet its cognitive consequences remain unexamined in this population. We introduce a novel application of longitudinal data from the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos and its neurocognitive aging ancillary study, using a detailed shift-work index that captures both schedule type and night-work frequency to assess cognitive function and change over roughly seven years among adults employed at baseline. We find that regular night-shift work is associated with persistently lower processing speed and verbal fluency, while other shift-work patterns show no consistent disadvantage—positioning schedule structure as a modifiable lever for reducing cognitive aging disparities.