Being health wards off dementia and Alzheimer's: Study

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDJul 14 2011

According to a new study even relatively minor health problems seemingly unrelated to the mind may affect a person's risk of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. This is apart from the other known risk factors like heart disease, strokes and other serious health conditions that affect the circulatory system or brain. The study was published this week in the journal Neurology.

The researchers from Canada analyzed data on 7,239 older people who periodically filled out detailed questionnaires about their overall health. As expected, the people with a history of heart disease and other known risk factors were more likely to develop dementia than their peers, but dementia was also linked to more than a dozen other conditions, including arthritis, bone fractures, incontinence, poor eyesight and hearing, sinus trouble and skin problems.

Results revealed that each of these conditions increased the risk of dementia by only about 3%, but those increases added up fast when the conditions occurred side by side. Study participants with none of the health problems had an 18% chance of developing dementia during the study, whereas those with 12 of the problems had a 40% chance, even after the researchers took into account age and established risk factors for dementia.

Lead author of the study, Dr. Kenneth Rockwood, a professor of geriatric medicine and neurology at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia advised, “It's worthwhile maintaining good health, because that will be associated with a lower risk of developing problems with your brain, particularly Alzheimer's disease and other dementias… It's worth people doing what they can to stay in the best health they can.”

At present it is unclear how conditions such as arthritis might contribute to dementia, but people with a heavy burden of health problems may be less able to fend off the deterioration of the brain that can come with aging, Dr. Rockwood suggests.

Dr. George Grossberg, a geriatric psychiatrist and professor at the St. Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri who was not a part of the study, says the findings underscore the importance of aggressively treating arthritis, vision and hearing loss, and other health problems in older people. He added that it is “is important for promoting health and may have an additional payoff in decreasing [or] delaying dementia”. He said, “There is no downside to vigorously treating frailty in the later years.”