Poor people have a seriously higher risk of developing dementia

Individuals on the lower end of the socio-economic ladder have a significantly higher risk of developing dementia according to a new study from a team of Chinese researchers.

The study was recently published in the journal Lancet Health Longevity and examined 440,000 individuals from Britain's BioBank data aged between 37 and 73 years old. 

Researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China conducted the study and wanted to look at the early onset of dementia, according to The Guardian. 

The researchers specifically looked at individuals under the age of 60 who did not have any obvious symptoms of dementia and also included an analysis of late-onset dementia. 

In order to study late-onset dementia information in their data, the researchers decided to examine individuals over the age of 65 or older until the BioBank’s research on those individuals concluded.

What’s interesting about the British BioBank data set used in the study is that it allowed the researcher to look at people from 2007 and 2010, as well as their 2022 follow-ups. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Chemical Engineer - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The UK BioBank is one of the world’s largest biomedical databases and resource studies according to the project's website and its data has been regularly updated since 2006.  

An unprecedented level of information was collected on the participants of the BioBank study and this has allowed researchers from a variety of fields to uncover several important health findings.  

The authors of the recent research on poverty and dementia risk using the BioBank study used its data because of the high level of detail it gathered in its research, something that allowed the researchers to study the effects of socio-economic status on dementia risks more thoroughly.

Lead author Rui Li and his colleagues gathered information on household income, highest educational qualification, and employment status to determine socio-economic status. 

From there, the researchers also looked at other important complicating factors such as alcohol consumption, smoking status, physical activity levels, and regular diets. 

Using this information, Li and his colleagues were able to determine that people on the low end of the socio-economic scale were three times more likely to develop dementia than individuals on the higher end of the socio-economic spectrum. 

The researchers found that only 12% of the cases of dementia that they studied could be attributed to complicating health and lifestyle factors, which means poverty might just help create the conditions for the onset of dementia. 

Interestingly, the study inadvertently suggested that people who lead poorer lives may be able to mitigate their risks of developing dementia by adopting healthy lifestyle practices and avoiding activities that can lead to dementia. 

The risk of developing early-onset dementia was greater among those living in a lower socio-economic situation than the risk of developing late-onset dementia, a finding that the study’s authors commented on in their conclusion. 

“In conclusion, early-onset dementia and late-onset dementia might have different risk factor profiles, the study’s authors wrote, adding that their research argued that both better social and fiscal policies were needed to combat the development of dementia. 

The authors explained that “relying solely on promoting healthy lifestyles might not substantially reduce the socioeconomic inequity in early-onset dementia and late-onset dementia risk without considering other social determinants of health.

The Guardian's Tobi Thomas reported that lower socio-economic status individuals who also led an unhealthy lifestyle increased their risks of developing early-onset dementia by 440% compared to individuals from a higher socio-economic background. 

Despite the findings and the conclusion of the study’s authors, they still believed that promoting individual healthy lifestyles would be key to cutting the disease burden of dementia from society, something with which other experts agreed. 

Public health researcher Tom Filippini told The Guardian “the importance of promoting healthy lifestyles from a young age, along with the independent role of factors including socioeconomic status in early-onset dementia and overall dementia incidence.”

“The findings suggest that efforts to reduce social disparities are strongly warranted to decrease dementia incidence … this study highlights that both social disparities and unhealthy lifestyles could have detrimental effects on overall dementia risk.”