Moderate to severe anxiety in midlife may be a risk factor for dementia

Medical News Today: Could anxiety lead to dementia?

Anxiety — a risk factor for dementia

More and more studies were highlighting a link between mental health problems and late-onset dementia — the most prevalent form of dementia, which affects people around the age of 65.

For instance, the authors of the new study write that depression has been shown to boost the risk of Alzheimer’s by almost twofold.

Anxiety often occurs together with depression, and symptoms of anxiety have often been reported by people years before receiving a diagnosis of dementia.

But until now, it has remained unclear whether these associations mean that anxiety and depression are the first symptoms that appear before the full-blown form of dementia develops, or whether anxiety and depression are independent risk factors.

So, to investigate this, Gimson and her team sifted through 3,500 studies in search of papers that examined the link between midlife depression, with or without anxiety, and late-onset dementia. Read More…

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