News From the Cause
Brain-injured veterans twice as likely to get dementia (MSNBC)
July 19, 2011
Two new studies — one in veterans and the other in retired football players — add to the mounting evidence linking head injuries to an increased the risk of dementia later in life. Veterans who had been diagnosed with a brain injury, anything from a concussion to a severe head wound, were more than twice as likely to develop dementia compared to those with no injury to the brain, researchers reported today at the Alzheimer’s Association’ International Conference in Paris.
The results were even more striking in a study of retired football players: 35 percent of the former National Football League players had signs of dementia, which compares to a 13 percent Alzheimer’s rate in the general population.
For the veterans study, researchers reviewed the medical records of 281,540 military personnel age 55 and older who received care at Veterans Administration hospitals from 1997 to 2000 and who had at least one follow-up visit from 2001 to 2007. None of the veterans in the study were diagnosed with dementia at the beginning of the seven year study.
Almost 5,000 of the veterans had been diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Their risk of developing dementia by the end of the study was 15.3 percent. That’s compared to 6.8 percent of those with no TBI diagnosis.
The football player study is a follow-up of earlier research that included a survey of nearly 4,000 retired NFL players in 2001. In 2008, new surveys were sent to the 905 players who were over 50 years old.
Of those who responded to the second survey, 513 had wives who could complete a section of questions addressing the players’ memory and cognition. “We were surprised that 35 percent of [the players] appeared to have significant cognitive problems,” said the new study’s lead researcher, Dr. Christopher Randolph of Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago. Click here to view more
