Strides have been made in the world of dementia research compared with even just a few years ago. There’s now a blood test that can diagnose Alzheimer’s accurately 90% of the time , and more is understood about the factors (many of which are lifestyle habits) that can put you at higher risk for the condition. In a new dementia report published in The Lancet journal by researchers who are part of The Lancet Commission, two new modifiable risk factors have been identified: high cholesterol after 40 and untreated vision loss.
In 2020, these same researchers determined 12 modifiable risk factors that are known to put folks at higher risk of developing dementia. These are: According to the report, these 12 factors, along with the two new ones, account for 49% of dementia cases across the world. Researchers determined these two new risk factors by looking at recent meta-analyses and studies on the topics; they looked at 14 papers on vision loss and 27 on high cholesterol.
“It makes a lot of mechanistic sense,” said Dr. Arman Fesharaki-Zadeh , a behavioral neurologist and neuropsychiatrist at Yale Medicine in Connecticut. “A lot of these factors are very much interrelated.
” (Fesharaki-Zadeh is not affiliated with the report.) “There are many sources of vision loss, of course, but it tends to be a lot more common in folks who have metabolic risk factors such as high blood pressure, such as poorly controlled diabetes, such as high cholesterol, which is the other risk fac.