Patients Suffering From More Age Related Conditions Exhibit a Greater Risk of Dementia
The growing burden of age-related cell and tissue damage, and consequent dysfunction, manifests in later stages as the presence of age-related conditions. The more age-related diseases that a person has, the greater the risk of the later onset of other conditions, simply because the underlying level of dysfunction and damage is high. Thus in this epidemiological study we see the expected correlation between the existence of multiple age-related conditions and greater risk of the onset of dementia. The best path forward to improve health in later life is to focus on the underlying damage, not the conditions themselves. Striking at the root of aging, successfully reversing the cell and tissue damage that causes aging, will improve all aspects of health.
Individual conditions have been identified as risk factors for dementia; however, it is important to consider the role of multimorbidity, as conditions often co-occur. This study investigated whether multimorbidity is associated with incident dementia and whether associations vary by different clusters of disease and genetic risk for dementia. The study used data from the UK Biobank cohort, with baseline data collected between 2006 and 2010 and with up to 15 years of follow-up. Participants included women and men without dementia and aged at least 60 years at baseline. The presence of at least 2 long-term conditions from a preselected list of 42 conditions was used to define multimorbidity.
A total of 206,960 participants (mean age 64.1 years) were included in the final sample, of whom 89,201 participants (43.1%) had multimorbidity. Over a mean of 11.8 years of follow-up, 6,182 participants (3.0%) developed dementia. The incidence rate was 1.87 per 1,000 person-years for those without multimorbidity and 3.41 per 1,000 person-years for those with multimorbidity. In Cox proportional hazards models adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, education, socioeconomic status, and APOE-ε4 carrier status, multimorbidity was associated with an increased risk of incident dementia (hazard ratio [HR], 1.63).
The highest dementia risk was observed for the hypertension, diabetes, and coronary heart disease cluster (HR 2.20) and pain, osteoporosis, and dyspepsia cluster (HR 2.00) in women and in the diabetes and hypertension cluster (HR 2.24) and coronary heart disease, hypertension, and stroke cluster (HR 1.94) in men, compared with no multimorbidity. The associations between multimorbidity and dementia were greater in those with a lower genetic risk of dementia (HR 1.96) than in those with a higher genetic risk of dementia (HR 1.39). Similar findings were observed when stratifying diseases clusters by genetic risk for dementia.
Could all this be related to low blood oxygen and nutrient levels in the brain? These deficiencies may have lead to the morbidities in the first place and then spiral downward. I'm a believer that lifestyle: diet/nutrition, defense against pollutants (filtered water, turning of routers at night, avoiding pharma, etc.), exercise, sleep, and love can affect way more than half of this.