ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — More than 55 million people in the world are living with dementia, a devastating disease that steals your ability to think, remember, and function. Doctors have been searching for links to dementia for years and they have new ones to report.
Every three seconds someone in the world develops dementia. Now, researchers are learning that changes in your eyes could predict brain decline down the road.
“A lot of people often refer to the eye as the window to the body, and what it really is, is that the eye is the window to the brain,” said Cecilia Lee, MD, MS, clinician-scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.
In one study, people with eye conditions like macular degeneration, retinopathy, and glaucoma, had a 40% higher risk of Alzheimer’s.
“The ultimate goal is to really provide treatment for the patients even before they develop symptoms of dementia,” explained Dr. Lee.
Another possible predictor is having a mood disorder like depression or bipolar later in life. In a recent study, people with these late-life mental health conditions were much more likely to have larger amounts of amyloid and tau in their brains. These substances are considered hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.
Soluble CD14 is a protein in your body that could also indicate your risk for dementia. Researchers have found higher CD14 markers predict a higher risk of developing all types of dementia.
“This is a marker of the degree of inflammation that’s happening in the brain and the blood,” explained Sudha Seshdri, behavioral neurologist at UT Health San Antonio.
Experts hope more options for diagnosing and predicting dementia will be available soon.
“I expect over the next five to six years, we will be able to provide more tools to people in primary care settings to give targeted advice,” said Dr. Seshdri.
In the mood disorder and dementia study, researchers found abnormal proteins like tau and amyloid can be detected years before traditional dementia symptoms appear. They say this could suggest that psychiatric symptoms may be one of the first clinical signs of a problem.
Contributors to this news report include: Julie Marks, Producer; Chuck Bennethum, Editor.
Sources:
https://www.alzint.org/about/dementia-facts-figures/dementia-statistics/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7108812/
* For More Information, Contact: Cecilia Lee, MD, MS
Clinician-Scientist at Washington University in St. Louis
and
Norma Aguilera
Assistant to the Director at UT Health San Antonio’s Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s & Neurodegenerative Diseases
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