Blood sugar disorder associated with 19 percent greater decline in thinking skills, study reports
WebMD News from HealthDay
By Kathleen Doheny
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, Dec. 1, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- A midlife diagnosis of diabetes or prediabetes may raise the risk of memory and thinking problems over the next 20 years, new research suggests.
Having diabetes in midlife was linked with a 19 percent greater decline in memory and thinking (cognitive) skills over 20 years, according to the new study.
"What we saw was, people with prediabetes, diabetes and poorly controlled diabetes had the higher risks of cognitive decline. The people with the worse cognitive decline were those with poorly controlled diabetes," said study researcher Elizabeth Selvin, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
However, the study authors acknowledged that this study was only able to find an association between diabetes and prediabetes and an increased risk of memory and thinking problems later in life. It wasn't able to determine if the blood sugar disorders were the actual cause of the memory and thinking issues.
Findings from the study are published in the Dec. 2 Annals of Internal Medicine. It was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
About 21 million U.S. adults have diabetes, according to background information in the study. In type 2 diabetes, the body doesn't use the hormone insulin effectively. Insulin helps get the sugars from foods into the body's cells to be used for energy. Type 2 diabetes is a risk factor for heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, blindness and kidney disease, according to the study.
Diabetes has also been linked with dementia risk, but how diabetes relates to earlier declines in memory and thinking is less well known, the study authors wrote.
"We know that cognitive decline occurs five to seven years before dementia. Our goal was to look at how diabetes might be contributing," Selvin said.
The new research followed more than 13,000 middle-aged adults over 20 years. They came from four states: Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi and North Carolina. At the start of the study -- 1990 to 1992 -- the study volunteers were 48 to 67 years old.
source : Midlife Diabetes Linked to Memory Problems Later
