LOS ANGELES—Treating stroke and dementia’s common risk factors may help ward off both
diseases, said Vladimir Hachinski, CM, MD, DSc,
in a lecture at the International Stroke Conference
2016. Effective stroke prevention efforts in Ontario
may have concurrently reduced the incidence of dementia, he said. Stroke and dementia have many of
the same risk factors, including hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, obesity, and diabetes. All of the
major dementias have a vascular component, and
stroke increases dementia risk. Further interactions
may relate the diseases, including blood pressure’s
effect on amyloid buildup and the effect of amyloid
on inflammation and lesion size after stroke, said
Dr. Hachinski, Professor of Neurology and Epidemiology at the University of Western Ontario in
London, Canada.
Incidence Declines
Luciano Sposato, MD, MBA, Dr. Hachinski, and colleagues reported in the December 2015 issue of JAMA
Neurology that a decline in stroke incidence in Ontario
corresponded with a decline in dementia incidence in the
same population. Between 2002 and 2013, the age- and
sex-standardized rate of stroke decreased by 32.4%, and
the rate of dementia decreased by 7.4%.
“For the past 12 years, the incidence of stroke in On-
tario has been decreasing steadily, and for the past six
years, it has been decreasing in dementia as well,” Dr.
Hachinski said. “Now we are trying to establish to what
extent and what kind of relationship there is between
stroke incidence and dementia incidence.”
Investigators are using three approaches. First, they
are evaluating the relationship mathematically using tar-
geted maximum likelihood estimation. Second, they are
May 2016
Volume 24, Number 5
Prevent Stroke, Prevent Dementia?
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