الفهرس 
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Abstract
SUMMARY
erceived stress is representing a major burden to older adults and their care givers and it is an important indicator of mental and physical health. Perceived stress is defined as a consequence of events or demands that exceeds an individual’s perceived ability to cope and when persons encounter situations they perceive as threatening, demanding. So, it stress is associated with not only exposure to stressors, but also personal coping skills and resources to deal with stressful situations.
Many tools can be used to measure to what extent individuals especially older adults are perceiving stressful conditions, in the current study, the Arabic version of Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) had been used to assess the degree to which life situations are perceived as stressful among Egyptian older adults. The Arabic PSS-10 consists of ten items, each of them assessing how unpredictable, uncontrollable, and overloaded respondents felt in their lives.
On the other side, cognitive decline is a part of normal aging; however, the pattern of decline is not uniform across domains. Fluid abilities such as speed, memory, reasoning, and visuospatial tasks tend to decline linearly from the twenties; comparatively, crystallized abilities such as vocabulary knowledge and verbal ability are spared, and even increase into the sixties.
So, elderly may experience a decline in a number of cognitive functions, including memory, attention, executive
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functions, processing speed. Moreover, the decline in cognitive abilities has been shown to lead to difficulty performing basic activities of daily living.
Being responsible for complex cognitive processes necessary for planning, organizing, guiding, revising, regulating, and evaluating behavior necessary to adapt effectively to the environment and to achieve goals, hence, studying all factors that can interfere with executive functions, including medical, psychological, and sensory concerns is mandatory.
Generally, there is a detrimental effect of both perceived and psychological stress on psychological well-being and cognitive functions especially executive functions affection making the timing of the stress experience an important determinant of its effect on cognitive decline up to dementia development in old age.
Therefore, the current study assessed the cross-sectional relationship between perceived stress and subsequent decline in executive functioning, in particular, as measured through performance changes in the TMT completion time and it was found that the higher the levels of perceived stress, the poorer executive functions that detected by longer TMT completion time.