Studies have shown that people with dementia are twice as likely to get Covid.

People with dementia were at a much higher risk of being infected with the coronavirus and were much more likely to be hospitalized and die than people without dementia. New research Millions of US medical records have been found.

Those risks could not be fully explained by the characteristics common to people with dementia, a known risk factor for Covid-19: old age, living in an elderly home, obesity, asthma, diabetes, heart. I have a condition such as vascular disease. Even after researchers adjusted for these factors, Americans with dementia were still twice as likely to be infected with Covid-19 at the end of last summer.

“It’s pretty compelling to suggest that there is something that makes you more vulnerable to dementia,” said Dr. Christine Jaffe, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. It was.

The study found that blacks with dementia were almost three times more likely to get the virus than whites with dementia. According to experts, it is likely to reflect the fact that colored races were generally disproportionately damaged during the pandemic.

“This study highlights the need to protect patients with dementia, especially black patients,” the authors write.

Maria Carillo, chief scientific officer of the Alzheimer’s Disease Association, which runs a journal that publishes research on Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, said in an interview: .. “

The study was led by researchers at Case Western Reserve University, who analyzed the electronic health records of 61.9 million people over the age of 18 in the United States from February 1st to August 21st, 2020. The data collected by IBM Watson HealthExplorys is as follows: The authors said they make up one-fifth of the US population from 360 hospitals and 317,000 healthcare providers in all 50 states.

Rong Xu, a professor of biomedical informatics at Case Western and the lead author of the study, said there was speculation about whether people with dementia were vulnerable to infection and harm from Covid-19.

“We thought,’We have the data and we can test this hypothesis,'” said Dr. Xu.

Researchers found that of the 15,770 patients with Covid-19 in the analyzed records, 810 also had dementia. Researchers adjusted for common demographic factors (age, gender, race) and found that people with dementia were more than three times more likely to be infected with Covid-19. Adjusting for Covid-specific risk factors, such as the place of residence of the nursing home and the underlying physical condition, narrowed the gap to some extent, but people with dementia were still twice as likely to become infected.

Experts and research authors have stated that the reasons for this vulnerability may include cognitive and physiological factors.

Dr. Kenneth Langa, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, said: I was not involved in the study. “There is cognitive impairment and the fact that they are more socially endangered,” he said.

Dr. Jaffe said that people with dementia may also have “vulnerable factors” that can affect their resilience to infections, such as lack of mobility and muscle tone.

Dr. Carrillo said coronavirus infection is associated with an inflammatory response that has been shown to affect other aspects of the blood vessels and circulatory system. Many people with dementia already have angiopathy, which can be exacerbated or amplified by Covid-19.

In fact, the authors of the study subdivided patients by the type of dementia described in electronic records, and those designated for vascular dementia were more infected than those designated for Alzheimer’s disease or other types. I found that the risk was high.

However, Dr. Langa and Dr. Jaffe warned that there was a significant overlap between types of dementia. Many patients suffer from both Alzheimer’s disease and vascular lesions, and non-specialist physicians may not be able to distinguish between subtypes when providing electronically recorded codes, they said.

When investigating the risk of hospitalization and death for Covid patients with dementia, researchers did not adjust demographics such as age or whether they live in a nursing home or have an underlying medical condition. They found that Covid patients with dementia were 2.6 times more likely to be hospitalized during the first 6 months of the pandemic than patients without dementia. They were 4.4 times more likely to die.

Blacks with Covid-19 and dementia were significantly more likely to be hospitalized than whites with both illnesses. The authors wrote that there was no significant difference in mortality between black and white coronavirus patients with dementia, but the 170 deaths analyzed were too small to draw a firm conclusion about it. There is.

Experts pointed out that one limitation of the study was the lack of access to socio-economic information by researchers, which could lead to a better understanding of patient risk factors.

Dr. Langa also said that the data only reflect people who interacted with the healthcare system, so it does not include “more isolated and poorer patients who have difficulty contacting doctors.”

As a result, he said the study may “underestimate the greater risk of Covid infection for people with dementia.”