May 1 2005
Dementia is now the latest scare factor to be added to an ever growing list of threats which so far includes diabetes, heart disease and stroke, which obese people are apparently more prone to.
According to research in the US, obesity, particularly in middle age women, increases the risk of developing dementia later in life.
Dr Rachel Whitmer and colleagues, of Kaiser Permanente, a health care organisation in Oakland, California, studied more than 10,000 men and women who were given detailed health evaluations from 1964 to 1973 when they were 40-45 years old and found after a 27-year follow-up, seven percent of the patients had developed dementia.
This equates, says Whitmer with a 74 percent more likelihood of developing dementia, while overweight people were 35 percent more likely to have dementia compared to those with normal weight. She says obese women had the highest, a 200 percent greater risk of dementia, than females of normal weight. Whitmer and her team said that if their findings are confirmed, treating obesity in middle age could help to reduce the risk of dementia in later life.
Obesity is measured by body mass index (BMI), calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by height in metres squared. A BMI of 30 or more is considered obese.
Excess weight is linked to higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers and psychological problems.
Because of the ageing of the global population, dementia is expected to increase 400 percent in the next 20 years and some estimates predict there will be 45 million sufferers worldwide by 2050.
Whitmer says that failure to contain the present epidemic of obesity may accentuate the expected age-related increase in dementia.
The research is published in the current British Medical Journal.
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