Nearly half of dementia cases may be connected to risk factors that people can potentially change, including smoking and high blood pressure. New research from Lund University has identified how specific risk factors are associated with Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia, the two most common causes of dementia.
A person's dementia risk is shaped partly by factors that cannot be altered, including age, gender and genetics. Other influences may be modifiable, such as smoking, cardiovascular disease, high blood lipids, physical activity, alcohol consumption, hearing loss and high blood pressure.
Dementia is not a single disease. It is a collection of symptoms that can result from several different disorders, which means the risks may vary depending on the underlying cause. Researchers at Lund University examined how individual risk factors are connected to brain changes associated with Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia.
"Much of the research available on the risk factors that we ourselves can influence does not take into account the different causes of dementia. This means that we have had limited knowledge of how individual risk factors affect the underlying disease mechanisms in the brain," explains Sebastian Palmqvist, senior lecturer in neurology at Lund University and senior physician at the Memory Clinic at Skåne University Hospital.
