US EditionSevere Infections Linked to Higher Dementia Risk Independent of Coexisting Illnesses
A Finnish study of 62,555 dementia patients found severe hospital-treated urinary tract and bacterial infections linked to a 19% higher dementia risk five to six years later.
- University of Helsinki researchers, led by Pyry Sipilä, found severe urinary tract infections are associated with a 19 percent greater dementia risk, analyzing health records of more than 62,000 people diagnosed between 2017 and 2020.
- Previous research linked infections to dementia but remained unclear whether other diseases explained the association. Researchers adjusted for 27 other conditions, confirming the infection link remained "robustly associated" with dementia risk independently.
- Participants experienced cystitis an average of six and a half years before dementia diagnosis. The study compared 62,555 dementia patients with 312,772 matched controls tracked over two decades.
- "It suggests that dementia risk may be partially modifiable," says Kuan-Ching Wu at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Prompt treatment and hydration for cystitis prevention could potentially lower future cognitive decline.
- Sipilä noted these observational findings cannot prove cause and effect due to possible unmeasured confounding factors. Ideally, intervention trials should examine whether better infection prevention reduces or delays dementia onset.
30 Articles
30 Articles
Severe infections linked to higher dementia risk independent of coexisting illnesses
Severe infections increase the risk of dementia independently of other coexisting illnesses, according to a new study published March 24th in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine by Pyry Sipilä of the University of Helsinki, Finland, and colleagues.
Dementia Risk Rises After Severe Infection
(MedPage Today) -- Dementia risk rose after older adults had severe infection and the risk was not attributable to other comorbidities, a Finnish registry study suggested. Of all hospital-treated diseases recorded 20 years before a dementia diagnosis...
Cystitis or tooth decay could trigger dementia just a few years later
Infections are increasingly being linked to a higher risk of dementia. In the latest research, scientists have found that being treated in hospital for a severe infection seems to raise the risk of developing the condition over the next five to six years
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