In a pivotal study conducted by the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, the connections between anxiety, benzodiazepine prescriptions, and the onset of dementia in patients over the age of 65 were examined.
The team found a clear association between the diagnosis of anxiety and an increased risk of developing dementia was observed.
Exposure to benzodiazepines led to a 28% increased risk of dementia.
However, when benzodiazepines were prescribed for patients already diagnosed with anxiety, there was no marked link between the medication and the emergence of dementia.
The study, titled “Anxiety Disorders, Benzodiazepine Prescription and Incident Dementia,” was made public on July 28 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
The Complexity of the Issue
Anxiety in older adults is tied to a plethora of health concerns like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, depression, social withdrawal, sleep disturbances, and more.
Benzodiazepine prescriptions for this age group are debated, given their connection to cognitive impairment and risks like falls.
Dr. Jay A. Brieler, the lead author, emphasized his concerns as a clinician about the potential linkage between benzodiazepine use and dementia.
The challenge lay in deciphering whether the disease (anxiety) or the treatment (benzodiazepine) was leading to dementia. This study suggests that while both may have a role, their interaction remains a mystery.
The study delved into the health data of 72,496 patients spanning 2014-21. This data, stripped of personal identifiers, was sourced from the Saint Louis University-SSM Healthcare System’s Virtual Data Warehouse (VDW).
The VDW archives clinical encounters from 2008 onward, covering a diverse range of patients across the Midwest.
For this study, eligible participants were those aged 65 or older, who had clinical encounters logged before and after the “index” date and had no dementia diagnosis for two years leading up to that date.
The majority of this cohort were white females with a median age of 74.
It’s noteworthy that the number of Americans aged 65 and above with an Alzheimer’s or related dementia diagnosis was five million in 2014, a number projected to double by 2060.
Implications and Future Recommendations
Senior author, Jeffrey Scherrer, Ph.D., praised the study for its adept use of real-world clinical data. This approach bypassed the need for extensive and resource-intensive long-term patient tracking.
However, the study leaves some questions unanswered, and the authors suggest that further investigations are needed to explore if the observed associations differ with other anxiety medications.
If you care about dementia, please read studies about walking patterns may help identify specific types of dementia, and common high blood pressure drugs may help lower your dementia risk.
For more information about dementia, please see recent studies that common antibiotic drugs may treat frontotemporal dementia, and results showing these antioxidants could help reduce dementia risk.
The study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
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