29 infections and diseases may raise dementia risk, new study says

Many risk factors contribute to someone’s chances of developing dementia, but this remains an area of ongoing investigation. One recent study sought to disentangle information to see if severe infection increases the risk for dementia.

The study included data from over 62,000 people with dementia and controls. Researchers were able to account for a number of conditions that also increase dementia risk, and the findings still suggest that severe infections may independently increase risk for dementia.

This study was a nationwide registry study in Finland. This allowed researchers to examine an extensive amount of data.

To start off, they identified hospital-presenting diseases that had “a prevalence of 1% or higher among dementia cases” and evaluated which increased dementia risk. Next, they examined the 20 years prior to an individual’s dementia to identify factors, such as the sequence of diseases linked to higher dementia risk.

Finally, they saw how much the link between severe infections remained after taking the other dementia-related diseases into consideration. For this study, severe infection referred to infections treated in the hospital.