Dementia Comes 5 Years Later for Some (MedPage Today):
A cognitively active lifestyle that involves reading and processing information in old age may delay the onset of dementia in Alzheimer’s disease by as much as 5 years, a longitudinal study suggested.
Older adults who had the highest level of late-life cognitive activity had a mean onset age of Alzheimer’s dementia of 94, reported Robert Wilson, PhD, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and colleagues.
In contrast, those with the lowest late-life cognitive activity levels developed dementia at age 89, they wrote in Neurology.
“Our study shows that people who engage in more cognitively stimulating activities may be delaying the age at which they develop dementia,” Wilson said in a statement.
“It is important to note, after we accounted for late-life level of cognitive activity, neither education nor early-life cognitive activity were associated with the age at which a person developed Alzheimer’s dementia,” he continued. “Our research suggests that the link between cognitive activity and the age at which a person developed dementia is mainly driven by the activities you do later in life.”
“This study provides further support for the concept of cognitive reserve, where genetic and life exposures allow some people to cope better than others with age- or disease-related brain changes,” noted Yaakov Stern, PhD, of Columbia University in New York City, who wasn’t involved with the research.
Cognitive Activity and Onset Age of Incident Alzheimer Disease Dementia (Neurology). From the Abstract:
- Objective: To test the hypothesis that higher level of cognitive activity predicts older age of dementia onset in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia.
- Methods: As part of a longitudinal cohort study, 1,903 older persons without dementia at enrollment reported their frequency of participation in cognitively stimulating activities. They had annual clinical evaluations to diagnose dementia and AD, and the deceased underwent neuropathologic examination. In analyses, we assessed the relation of baseline cognitive activity to age at diagnosis of incident AD dementia and to postmortem markers of AD and other dementias.
- Results: During a mean of 6.8 years of follow-up, 457 individuals were diagnosed with incident AD at a mean age of 88.6 (SD = 6.4; range: 64.1–106.5). In an extended accelerated failure time model, higher level of baseline cognitive activity (mean 3.2, SD = 0.7) was associated with older age of AD dementia onset (estimate = 0.026; 95% confidence interval: 0.013. 0.039). Low cognitive activity (score = 2.1, 10th percentile) was associated with a mean onset age of 88.6 compared to a mean onset age of 93.6 associated with high cognitive activity (score = 4.0, 90th percentile). Results were comparable in subsequent analyses that adjusted for potentially confounding factors. In 695 participants who died and underwent a neuropathologic examination, cognitive activity was unrelated to postmortem markers of AD and other dementias.
- Conclusion: A cognitively active lifestyle in old age may delay the onset of dementia in AD by as much as 5 years.