It Turns Out UTIs May Influence Your Dementia Risk

Genes, age, and cardiovascular health can all affect dementia risk. And some lifestyle choices might have an impact too: everything from reading and writing to switching to vegetable oils, and “speed of processing” brain games might reduce your likelihood of developing the condition.

And new research has suggested that urinary tract infections (UTIs) might matter too.

Published in PLOS Medicine, its “results support the role of severe infections as independent risk factors for dementia”.

In this paper, researchers looked at over 62,000 Finnish people aged 65 or over. They had all been diagnosed with dementia.

The study also included 312,772 “control” participants who didn’t have dementia.

The researchers saw links between 29 hospital-treated diseases, including “mental, behavioural, digestive, endocrine, cardiometabolic, neurological, and eye diseases, as well as injuries”.

These “occurred 1-21 years before dementia diagnosis,” but only two of them were infections (cystitis, or a UTI, and bacterial infections “of an unspecified site”).

“Severe infections have been linked to an increased risk of dementia, but both conditions often coexist with other illnesses that may confound this association,” the study reads.

In other words, there was already a link between bacterial infections and dementia risk, but scientists weren’t sure if they were an independent risk factor.

But once they adjusted for the 27 other conditions, researchers found that UTIs and bacterial infections of an unspecified site appeared to be linked to a 19% higher dementia risk.

“These results support the role of severe infections as independent risk factors for dementia,” the study reads.

This was an observational study, which only showed associations and not cause.

On average, these bacterial infections happened five to six years ahead of a dementia diagnosis, which the study authors speculated might mean that they push an already dementia-prone patient to a tipping point, “rather than initiate neurodegeneration in a cognitively healthy person.”

The paper concluded, “Overall, our findings support the possibility that severe infections increase dementia risk; however, intervention studies are required to establish whether preventing or effectively treating infections yields benefits for dementia prevention.”