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Heart Risk Factors in Midlife Raise Dementia Risk
Last Updated: 2005-01-24 16:00:44 -0400 (Reuters Health)
By Karla Gale
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The presence in middle age of risk factors for
cardiovascular disease, like smoking or high cholesterol, is strongly tied
to the development of dementia later in life, investigators in California
report.
"What is bad for the heart is also bad for the brain," Dr. Rachel A. Whitmer
said in an interview with Reuters Health. "Future research needs to figure
out what the mechanisms are."
Whitmer, with Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research, Oakland, and her
colleagues studied data on 8845 subjects who were members of the HMO and had
equal access to medical care.
The team correlated the results of health exams conducted between 1964 and
1973, when the participants were between 40 and 44 years old, and the
diagnosis of dementia between 1994 and 2003. Dementia was documented among
721 individuals at ages 66 to 82.
Each of four risk factors -- diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol
and smoking -- was significantly associated with a 20 to 40 percent
increased risk of dementia, the authors report in the journal Neurology.
Subjects with all four risk factors had more than double the likelihood of
being diagnosed with dementia compared with those with none of the risk
factors, after factoring in age, race, gender and education.
"It appears that dementia is not a separate neurodegenerative process that
happens in the brain," Whitmer said. "We've shown that there is a vascular
side to it."
She pointed out that all the subjects were members of an HMO, so "certainly
they were treated and still they were at a greater risk of dementia versus
those who didn't have these diseases."
She suggested that earlier, more aggressive treatment of risk factors --
improving blood glucose control among people with diabetes, lowering
cholesterol levels, reducing high blood pressure, and smoking cessation --
may show that "the risk of dementia could be largely modifiable."
SOURCE: Neurology, January 25, 2005.
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