Diabetes ups risk of dementia

Diabetes may hasten progression to dementia in older people with mild thinking impairment.

So-called mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, increases a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia. But aside from a person's severity of mental impairment, there is currently no way to predict which people with MCI will go on to develop full-blown dementia. Diabetes has been tied to mental decline and dementia in aging, but it is not currently known whether people with MCI who have diabetes are at greater risk of future dementia.

To investigate this, researchers in U.K. followed 103 men and women with MCI over age 65 for four years, during which time 19 developed dementia. Most of these individuals had probable or possible Alzheimer's.

It was found that the 16 individuals in the study with diabetes were nearly three times as likely to develop dementia compared to the study participants without diabetes. It was concluded that diabetes increases not only the risks of dementia and mild cognitive impairment but also the risk of progression from such impairment to dementia and this could be through its effects on insulin, which plays a key role in how the brain uses glucose for fuel.