Of particular interest to us is the classes where there is no association. Previously, antihistamines have been implicated( in dementia risk), but we've not found any association between those specifically and dementia, as well as the gastrointestinal drugs.

George Savva

Categorized in : Top News

Previous studies had really only said that anticholinergics were associated with dementia incidence, but we broke it down by class, which is where our study really has its novelty and power.

In total, there were 27 million prescription events that we were looking at over that period, and we found that about 9 % of our( dementia) cases had taken anticholinergics in the past, compared to about 6 % of our controls.

For the urological and antidepressants, there's quite a clear association between their long-term use and dementia incidence...( and) for anti-Parkinson's medications, the risk is there, but there's far fewer of those prescriptions in the database, so there's a lot less certainty, but it's difficult to generalize across patients, and it's difficult to talk about an individual because this is a population average risk and it depends very much on the patient.