Tag Archives: Dementia

Health

Processed Meat Linked to Increased Dementia Risk, Study Finds

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People’s love of processed meat might come back to bite them in the long run, new research from the UK suggests. The study found a link between greater consumption of processed meat and higher rates of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. At the same time, it also found a possible link between eating unprocessed meats and a lower risk of dementia.

Processed meats such as bacon, jerky, and hot dogs don’t exactly have a reputation for being healthy in the first place. Other research has suggested that diets high in these foods are linked to chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some types of cancer. Some studies have even pointed to a link between processed meats and the increased risk of neuropsychiatric symptoms, such as episodes of bipolar depression.

There’s been mixed evidence that a diet high in meat could raise a person’s risk of dementia in their later years. But according to the authors of this new study, published Monday in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, there’s been less work to separate out the possible dementia risk from different types of meats (processed versus not) and whether genetics may play a role in that risk.

The study relied on population data from the UK Biobank, an ongoing research project that’s collected health and genetic information from around a half million residents, ages 40 to 69, between 2006 and 2010. As part of the project, volunteers filled out a questionnaire about their diet at the start of their enrollment and in periodic online surveys for up to 16 months after. Because of the UK’s nationalized health system, the researchers were then able to track the health outcomes of these participants, including whether they developed or died from dementia.

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About 2,900 cases of dementia were diagnosed in the entire group, during an average eight-year follow-up period. And when the researchers tried to account for people’s diets, they found a clear association between processed meat and the risk of dementia, but they didn’t see the correlation when it came to other types of meat.

For example, the associated risk of dementia rose by 44% for every 25 grams of processed meat eaten daily. But there was no significant link found between dementia risk and total meat consumption or between dementia risk and a person’s daily intake of chicken. Meanwhile, the associated risk of dementia actually declined slightly for those who regularly ate unprocessed red meat (cooked beef, veal, pork, etc.). The risk of dementia increased for those who carried the APOE ε4 genetic variation, as expected, but this risk wasn’t affected by meat consumption.

“Our findings suggest that consumption of processed meat may increase risk of incident dementia, and unprocessed red meat intake may be associated with lower risks,” the authors wrote.

Nutritional studies like this one have their limitations, of course. For instance, they can’t show a direct cause-and-effect relationship between any two things, only a correlation. Studying people’s diets is hard in general, since we aren’t the greatest at remembering what and how much of any given food we eat regularly. And of course, a person’s diet at 40 or 50 might still change significantly between then and the time of their dementia diagnosis years or decades later.

Any single study shouldn’t be seen as the final verdict on a topic. More research will have to be done to tease out the potential effects of a diet high in processed meats on our dementia risk and how these diets may be causing it. That said, as mentioned earlier, this wouldn’t be the first study tying processed meats to worsening health. So while the specifics still need to be worked on, it’s likely in many of our best interests to cut down on bacon or sausage anyway.

“Worldwide, the prevalence of dementia is increasing and diet as a modifiable factor could play a role,” said lead author Huifeng Zhang, a PhD student from the University of Leeds’ School of Food Science and Nutrition, in a statement released by the UK-based university. “Our research adds to the growing body of evidence linking processed meat consumption, to increased risk of a range of non-transmissible diseases.”

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Health

Eating one rasher of bacon a day increases your chance of getting dementia by 44%, study suggests

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Eating processed meat such as sausages, bacon and burgers could dramatically increase the risk of getting dementia, new research shows.

The findings suggest that eating just one rasher of bacon a day could increase your chances of developing the disease by a staggering 44 per cent.

However meat-lovers need not despair, as scientists conducting the study also found that eating some unprocessed meat including beef, pork and veal can protect against dementia.

In the study, people who ate 50g a day of unprocessed meat were almost 20 per cent less likely to develop the condition.

The findings suggest eating just one rasher of bacon a day could increase the chances of getting the disease by a staggering 44 per cent

The research, by Leeds University, explored a potential link between eating meat and developing dementia using data from 500,000 people.

Professor Janet Cade, who supervised the research, said: ‘Anything we can do to explore potential risk factors for dementia may help us to reduce rates of this debilitating condition.

‘This analysis is a first step towards understanding whether what we eat could influence that risk.’

Researchers investigated links between eating different types of meat and dementia risk.

The research explored a potential link between eating meat and developing dementia using data from 500,000 people

The team studied data from the UK Biobank database containing genetic and health information from half a million Brits aged 40 to 69 between 2006 and 2010.

This included how often people snacked on different kinds of meat, with six options from never to once or more daily.

Vegetarian and vegan diets were not looked at specially but the study did include people who avoided red meat.

Over an average of eight years, almost 2,900 dementia cases emerged.

This was seen in people who were generally older, more economically deprived, less educated, more likely to smoke, less physically active, more likely to have stroke history and family dementia history, and more likely to carry a dementia-related gene.

More men than women were diagnosed with dementia in the study.

Meat consumption has previously been associated with dementia risk, but this is believed to be the first large-scale study. Steak ( stock pictured)

Professor Cade said: ‘Some people were three to six times more likely to develop dementia due to well established genetic factors, but the findings suggest the risks from eating processed meat were the same whether or not a person was genetically predisposed to developing the disease.

‘Those who consumed higher amounts of processed meat were more likely to be male, less educated, smokers, overweight or obese, had lower intakes of vegetables and fruits, and had higher intakes of energy, protein, and fat including saturated fat.’

Meat consumption has previously been associated with dementia risk, but this is believed to be the first large-scale study of participants over time to examine a link between specific meat types and amounts, and the risk of developing the disease.

Lead researcher Huifeng Zhang, a PhD student at the University of Leeds, said: ‘Worldwide, the prevalence of dementia is increasing and diet as a modifiable factor could play a role.

‘Our research adds to the growing body of evidence linking processed meat consumption to increased risk of a range of non-transmissible diseases.’

Dementia’s development and progression are associated with both genetic and environmental factors, including diet and lifestyle

There are around 50 million dementia cases globally, with around ten million new cases diagnosed every year.

Alzheimer’s Disease makes up 50 per cent to 70 per cent of cases, and vascular dementia around 25 per cent.

Its development and progression are associated with both genetic and environmental factors, including diet and lifestyle.

Ms Zhang added: ‘Further confirmation is needed, but the direction of effect is linked to current healthy eating guidelines suggesting lower intakes of unprocessed red meat could be beneficial for health.’

The findings were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition Monday.

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Health

Study Finds People With Dementia Are Twice as Likely to Get Covid

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People with dementia had significantly greater risk of contracting the coronavirus, and they were much more likely to be hospitalized and die from it, than people without dementia, a new study of millions of medical records in the United States has found.

Their risk could not be entirely explained by characteristics common to people with dementia that are known risk factors for Covid-19: old age, living in a nursing home and having conditions like obesity, asthma, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. After researchers adjusted for those factors, Americans with dementia were still twice as likely to have gotten Covid-19 as of late last summer.

“It’s pretty convincing in suggesting that there’s something about dementia that makes you more vulnerable,” said Dr. Kristine Yaffe, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.

The study found that Black people with dementia were nearly three times as likely as white people with dementia to become infected with the virus, a finding that experts said most likely reflected the fact that people of color generally have been disproportionately harmed during the pandemic.

“This study highlights the need to protect patients with dementia, especially those who are Black,” the authors wrote.

Maria Carrillo, chief science officer of the Alzheimer’s Association, which runs the journal that published the study, Alzheimer’s and Dementia, said in an interview, “One of the things that has come from this Covid situation is that we should be pointing out these disparities.”

The study was led by researchers at Case Western Reserve University who analyzed electronic health records of 61.9 million people age 18 and older in the United States from Feb. 1 through Aug. 21, 2020. The data, collected by IBM Watson Health Explorys, came from 360 hospitals and 317,000 health care providers across all 50 states and represented a fifth of the American population, the authors said.

Rong Xu, a professor of biomedical informatics at Case Western and the senior author of the study, said there had been speculation about whether people with dementia were more prone to infection and harm from Covid-19.

“We thought, ‘We have the data, we can just test this hypothesis,’” Dr. Xu said.

The researchers found that out of 15,770 patients with Covid-19 in the records analyzed, 810 of them also had dementia. When the researchers adjusted for general demographic factors — age, sex and race — they found that people with dementia had more than three times the risk of getting Covid-19. When they adjusted for Covid-specific risk factors like nursing home residency and underlying physical conditions, the gap closed somewhat, but people with dementia were still twice as likely to become infected.

Experts and the study authors said the reasons for this vulnerability might include cognitive and physiological factors.

“Folks with dementia are more dependent on those around them to do the safety stuff, to remember to wear a mask, to keep people away through social distancing,” said Dr. Kenneth Langa, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the study. “There is the cognitive impairment and the fact that they are more socially at risk,” he said.

Dr. Yaffe said there could also be a “frailty element” to people with dementia, including a lack of mobility and muscle tone, that could affect their resilience to infections.

Dr. Carrillo noted that coronavirus infection was associated with an inflammatory response that has been shown to affect blood vessels and other aspects of the circulatory system. Many people with dementia already have vascular impairment, which may be compounded or amplified by Covid-19.

Indeed, the study authors subdivided patients by the type of dementia listed in the electronic records and found that people designated as having vascular dementia had a greater risk for infection than people designated as having Alzheimer’s disease or other types.

But Dr. Langa and Dr. Yaffe cautioned that there was significant overlap between types of dementia. Many patients have both Alzheimer’s pathology and vascular pathology, they said, and physicians who are not specialists may not distinguish subtypes in providing codes for electronic records.

In examining the risk of hospitalization and death for Covid patients with dementia, the researchers did not adjust for demographics like age or whether they lived in nursing homes or had underlying medical conditions. They found that Covid patients with dementia were 2.6 times as likely to have been hospitalized during the first six months of the pandemic as those without dementia. They were 4.4 times as likely to die.

Black people with Covid-19 and dementia were significantly more likely to be hospitalized than white people who had both diseases. The authors did not find a significant difference in the mortality rate for Black and white coronavirus patients with dementia, although they wrote that the number of deaths analyzed, 170, might be too small to provide a solid conclusion about that.

Experts noted that one limitation to the study was that researchers did not have access to socioeconomic information, which could provide increased understanding of patients’ risk factors.

Dr. Langa also noted that the data reflected only people who have interacted with the health care system, so it doesn’t include “more isolated and poorer patients that have a harder time getting to doctors.”

Consequently, he said, the study may be “an underestimate of the greater Covid infection risk for those with dementia.”

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Health

Dementia, Alzheimer’s not an inevitable part of aging: Study

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Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease may not be an inevitable part of aging, according to a recent Dutch study, which identified 100-year-olds with high cognitive performance despite risk factors for decline.

This six-year study of centenarians — people who are over 100 years old — found that despite high levels of a brain marker associated with cognitive decline, called amyloid beta, these centenarians were still sharp and performed well on cognitive tests. The researchers concluded these elderly subjects may have resilience mechanisms protecting them from memory loss.

In fact, they said the risk of dementia may not necessarily increase once you pass your 100th birthday.

“A person between 70 and 95 years old is exposed to the same dementia risk as a person who lives between age 100 and 102,” said Henne Holstege, Ph.D., of Amsterdam University Medical College in the Netherlands, who was involved in the study.

These results provide a hopeful glimmer to some that although dementia and Alzheimer’s is more likely to occur with an increase in age, it won’t be everyone’s fate.

“Age is the No. 1 risk factor for Alzheimer’s, but these findings show us that it’s possible for centenarians to thrive despite their advanced age,” said Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who headed the study.

Although these findings shed light on aging and cognitive function, it still remains a complex phenomenon that needs more exploration, according to some experts.

“Dementia and Alzheimer’s tend to be multifactorial conditions, meaning that a mix of genetics, age, environment, lifestyle behaviors and medical conditions that coexist together and can lead a person toward or away from cognitive decline,” said Isaacson.

Researchers still aren’t sure exactly why some people are protected from cognitive decline, while others are spared. The researchers in the study proposed some of these protective factors associated with cognitive performance could be education, frequent cognitive activity and even IQ. But there can be more at play.

“There could be protective immunologic and cardiovascular risk factors that help keep their brains resilient and cognitively functional even in old age,” said Dr. Gayatri Devi, a neurologist and psychiatrist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

The role the brain markers analyzed in the study play on memory, including a sticky plaque called amyloid beta typically found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, is now hotly debated among experts. The varying presence of these markers in this study further contribute to this complicated process.

“It’s important to understand that the presence of amyloid in the brain does not definitively mean a person will develop dementia,” said Isaacson. “There are other factors and lifestyle behaviors that can make us resilient and resistant to cognitive decline.”

Importantly, there are some caveats to this study. For instance, the brain markers were only analyzed in 44 of the participants, so the findings may not apply to everyone, and more research needs to be done to learn about the complexity of aging.

Other studies have investigated prevention of cognitive decline. According to the 2020 Lancet Commission Report, 40% of dementia cases may be preventable based on modifiable risk factors. Some of these previous studies have had success in improving cognitive function and reducing risk.

A study by Isaacson’s team at the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic found it was possible to improve cognitive function and reduce risk, especially in those who followed suggestions on lifestyle modification, such as exercise, nutrition, vascular risk and medications.

Even though more is being discovered and debated, experts still recommend maintaining a healthy lifestyle, including balanced eating, exercising and doctor visits, to maintain cognition during aging.

“It’s essential for people at risk to see their doctors on a regular basis and consider cognitive screening tests,” said Isaacson.

Alexis E. Carrington, M.D., is a dermatology research fellow at the University of California, Davis and a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.

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