The possible link between between your gut health and risk Dementia
I recently read an article that talked about the link between gut health and the risk of developing neurodegenerative disorders like dementia. As someone who has been very interested in the connection between our brain and gut for a long time, I wanted to dive into this a bit more.
Here, I break down one of the studies in the article to better understand the researchers methods, their results and the conclusions they came to.
What they did
Dementia is a neurodegenerative disorder, which means it leads to the brain breaking down. This causes serious memory issues and decreases in executive functions like reasoning, decision making, and everyday thinking skills. The rates of dementia are drastically increasing and a large part of that could be due to inflammation. Irritable bowel disease (IBD) is a long-term illness that creates serious inflammation in the digestive tract. The two main types are Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). Due to the connection of high levels in inflammation impacting both dementia and IBD, this study looked at past patient records to see if there was a link in patients with IBD developing Dementia.
How they did it
The researchers accessed a large, anonymous database of patient records that has been used in previous studies to mirror real-life data in Germany. The data included diagnoses, medications patients were given, demographics, and other treatments. Patients who had been diagnosed with IBD from 1995-2014, were 60 years or older, and did not have a dementia diagnosis at the start of the study. The researchers also looked at a similar group without IBD as a comparison. They analyzed patient data for a period of 15 years to see how many patients had developed three forms of dementia (vascular dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and a form of unspecified dementia where the cause was unknown). A total of 3,850 patients with IBD and 3,850 controls (those without IBD) were included in the study.
What they found
After 15 years, the study found that 26% of people with IBD developed compared to 24% without IBD. Breaking that down further they found that 28% with UC were diagnosed with dementia compared to 23% without UC. And CD did not significantly affect dementia risk. While these numbers seem close, with secondary analysis (a deeper dive into the data), they found that people with IBD were 1.2 times more likely to get dementia and those with UC were 1.3 times more likely. Furthermore, being between 60-70 years old put you at significantly higher risk (1.4 times) than the other age groups.
Why it’s important
The study suggests that having IBD, particularly UC, can put you at higher risk for developing dementia. This finding is important as gut and IBD related conditions continue to rise as the inflammation it causes could be a factor in dementia neurodegeneration. The research had several limitations, including no record of the severity of IBD or how long patients had the disease. There wasn’t consideration of other medications or supplements patients were taking that could affect brain health. There was also no record of the patient's lifestyle, which could impact both IBD severity and risk of dementia. Regardless, the study shows that there could be a link in IBD and dementia, though more research needs to be done to better understand this connection.
Link to original article:
Association Between Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Dementia: A Retrospective Cohort Study