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Researchers at Dalhousie University claim that your overall health is a more important risk factor for developing dementia than the accumulation of protein in the brain.
Lindsay Wallace, Ph.D. student, and Dr. Kenneth Rockwood, co-authors of an innovative study, reviewed the medical history of 456 elderly Illinois.
Brain plaque has long been badociated with dementia, but differences of opinion about its role in the development of cognitive disease have been expressed.
The Dalhousie study, the most comprehensive of its kind, supports the camp that questions the importance of brain plaque as a risk factor for driving. Wallace badyzed the plaques and tangles of amyloid – the protein strands that kill brain cells – in relation to the degree of fragility of the person and the presence of dementia.
She concluded that one in five had a significant gap between the amount of brain plaque and the degree of cognitive impairment.
"We looked at people almost without plaques or tangles and found that if they were frail, they were more likely to have dementia," while others who had a lot of plaques but were in good health had not been diagnosed with dementia. .
The fragility-dementia badociation is not new, but this is the first study that indicates that the risk factor is more important than the brain plaque, said Wallace in an interview Friday in his office building Veterans Memorial Building at Camp Hill Hospital in Halifax.
"So it's very important to me in terms of the impact, because it's a modifiable factor for which we can have interventions," she said.
"People can change their lifestyle, exercise, take care of their nutrition, manage their chronic diseases and it can reverse their fragility, reducing the burden of disease and their specific risk."
The study, funded by the Dalhousie Medical Research Foundation, was conducted in conjunction with the Memory and Aging project at Rush University in Chicago. Annual cognitive tests were performed over 20 years on 456 seniors, who also agreed to donate their brains for research autopsies.
"It was an amazing gift for the research community," said Wallace, who recently completed her master's degree at McGill University and returned to Dalhousie, where she did her undergraduate work, to do her dissertation. PhD in Geriatrics with Rockwood and Dr. Melissa. Andrew. "So we formed a group with a group and asked them if we could use the data."
Rockwood said the study was not intended to rule out the link between brain proteins and dementia. Plaque is often found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, the most common cause of dementia.
"There has to be something to do with this and I do not dispute it," said Kathryn Allen Weldon Professor Kathryn Professor of Alzheimer's Disease Research in Dalhousie, who has been studying geriatric disease ever since. over 30 years old.
"But we have to think of it as (dementia) especially among older people with a lot of things that are not going well. And there are many treatments that work really well in young people who do not work for the same disease in older adults. As a geriatrician, we need to take an approach to the diseases of aging that recognizes that the problem of old age is a whole, that it is not just one thing. "
About 17,000 Nova Scotians have dementia and this number is expected to double over the next two decades.
Wallace and Rockwood will continue to work with the Rush study data this year to better understand the link between frailty and the onset of dementia symptoms over time.
READ THE COMPLETE STUDY HERE
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