Senile dementia and microflora
Intestinal inflammation increases the risk of dementia
A recent study conducted by scientists from the United States and Taiwan found a high degree of correlation between gut health and mental health. People suffering from inflammatory bowel diseases (such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease) have more than twice the risk of dementia.
"The data obtained suggest that there may be a link between inflammatory bowel diseases and a decrease in neurocognitive ability," says the first author of the study, Bing Zhang from the University of California, San Francisco. The authors used the Taiwan National Health Insurance database to monitor the health status of 1,742 people aged 45 years and older who had at least two diagnoses of inflammatory bowel diseases between January 1998 and December 2011. No one had dementia at this point. Each participant was compared with ten people from the same base of the same gender, age and income level, but who did not have inflammatory bowel diseases. Further, the condition of these people was monitored until 2013 (or until the moment of death).
It turned out that in patients with intestinal disease, dementia was detected in 5.5% of cases, while in control patients – in 1.4%. At the same time, for people with intestinal diseases, the average age of manifestation of dementia symptoms was slightly more than 76 years, which is about seven years earlier compared to the control group. After taking into account factors such as age, gender and other diseases, all people with inflammatory bowel diseases had a 2.5 times higher risk of developing dementia than people without these diseases. For Alzheimer's disease, the risk increases sixfold. The risk does not depend on the specific intestinal disease.
Fiona Carragher, chief specialist at Alzheimer's Society, says the role of gut health and the gut microbiome is key to dementia research. But, as she warned, this study does not show that inflammatory bowel diseases directly increase the chances of getting dementia later in life. "There are many other factors that were not controlled in this study, including diet, exercise and elements of psychological health, such as depression and anxiety, that could play a role," she noted.
Tom Foltini, professor of neurology at University College London, agrees with this opinion, but notes that a direct link between diseases cannot be ruled out. According to him, the causal relationship mediated through the inflammatory process remains an important potential mechanism that can become a target of therapeutic intervention.
The study is published in Gut (Zhang et al., Inflammatory bowel disease is associated with higher dementia risk: a nationwide longitudinal study).
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