Background: Health lifestyle are greatly associated with cognitive health in older adults. However, the mechanism behind this relationship is unclear. Previous research has confirmed that health literacy can moderate the effect of individual factors on health status, but it is not known whether it generalizes to ehealth literacy. Ehealth literacy is the expansion of health literacy in the Internet age, which is more and more important to maintain and promote health. Moreover, there is still a lack of research on the relationship between e-health literacy and cognitive health.
Objective: To examine the associations among health-promoting lifestyles, eHealth literacy, and cognitive. And to investigate whether ehealth literacy moderates the association between health-promoting lifestyles and cognitive health.
Methods: Data are from the 2019 health care survey collected by ShanDong University of TCM, and 1201 aged ≥ 60 years Chinese older adults completed the questionnaire survey about health-promoting lifestyle, ehealth literacy, cognitive health and participant sociodemographic information.
Results: Health-promoting lifestyle and ehealth literacy were significantly positively associated with cognitive health (both p< .01). Moreover, ehealth literacy moderated the relationship between health-promoting lifestyle and cognitive health (β=-.073, p<0.001).
Conclusion: Health-promoting lifestyle and ehealth literacy are both likely to maintain and promote the cognitive health of older adults. Ehealth literacy negatively moderates the relationship between health promotion lifestyle and cognitive health. Therefore, the interventions on healthy lifestyles and ehealth literacy should be provided to the older adults.