Childhood Inductive Reasoning, Cardiovascular and Cardiometabolic Morbidity and Dementia Risk – a Population Representative Cohort Study Across Six Decades

Higher cognitive ability in late adolescence and young adulthood associate with reduced risk of dementia, but such assessments are influenced by educational selection. Whether specific cognitive abilities earlier in childhood associate with later dementia risk, independent of known associations with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes, remains unclear. We studied a Swedish population-representative birth cohort with cognitive testing at age 13 (n = 10,539 born in 1948). Dementia and somatic morbidity were ascertained from nationwide inpatient and cause-of-death registers through November 2025 (> 6 decades). Cox models estimated associations between childhood inductive reasoning, verbal and spatial ability scores and dementia, somatic morbidity, CVD and diabetes, each modelled as outcomes and as time-varying covariates in dementia models. During follow-up, 287 individuals (2.7