Older adults with COVID-19 have 80 per cent higher risk of Alzheimer's: Study

Older people with COVID-19 have a 50–80% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease within a year, claimed a research.

According to a US research which was released on Wednesday in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, discovered that women who were at least 85 years old had the highest risk of developing the illness.

The researchers said that it is uncertain if COVID-19 causes or hastens the formation of Alzheimer's disease.

"The elements that contribute to the development of Alzheimer's disease have been poorly understood, but two pieces are deemed important: past infections, especially viral infections, and inflammation," said Pamela Davis of the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in the US. 

Since SARS-CoV-2 infection has been linked to inflammation and other abnormalities of the central nervous system, she explained, "we wanted to examine whether COVID could increase diagnoses even in the short term."

The researchers examined 6.2 million US people 65 and older who got medical care between February 2020 and May 2021 but had not yet been given an Alzheimer's disease diagnosis.

Then, they separated this population into two groups: one with individuals who had COVID-19 during that time, and the other with individuals who had no known cases of the virus.

The COVID-19 study group had more than 400,000 participants, compared to 5.8 million in the non-infected group.

The number of patients who will be suffering from an illness for which there is presently no solution will be significant, and this could put further strain on our long-term care resources, according to Davis.

''We believed we had partially reversed the tide of Alzheimer's disease by reducing general risk factors including hypertension, heart disease, obesity, and a sedentary lifestyle,'' she continued.