The risk of some adults developing dementia is on the decline in the United States, according to a recent study.
The study, published in the Feb. 11 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed data from more than 5,000 participants in the Framingham Heart Study. Researchers from the Boston University School of Medicine found that between 1977 and 2008, the risk of dementia for the average adult over the age of 60 declined by 20 percent each decade.
“One of the goals of U.S. National Alzheimer’s plan is that by 2025 we will effectively reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (it uses “Alzheimer’s disease” as an overarching term for all late-life causes of dementia),” Penn Memory Center Co-Director Dr. Jason Karlawish wrote in his column for Forbes. “This study suggests we’re already achieving that goal.”
Specifically, the steepest decline was found in dementia caused by vascular disease.
“In contract, there was not a significant decline, but also not a significant increase, in the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease,” Karlwish wrote in the column. “We’re preventing dementia, but not the dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease.”
The reduced risk was also seen only in adults with at least a high school education more than 40 or 50 years after graduation.
The study “recapitulates data how education leads to subsequent social and economic opportunities or lack of opportunities that can influence health and well-being with aging,” Karlawish said.
The results are all the more proof of the need for continued research into Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Researchers have shown that current projections might not be accurate.
“Currently, our approaches rely on using a static estimate of what the risk is. We assume that the risk now is what it is going to be 30 years from now,” Karlawish said in an interview with MedPage Today. “Future estimates of the prevalence of dementia…are going to need to account for changes in the risk.”
“We’re going to have to switch from simpler methods to probably some more complicated micro-simulation methods so that our national plan for Alzheimer’s disease is informed by good data about whether the prevalence is going up more than we thought, going down, or staying the same, compared to what we thought it was going to be.”