WASHINGTON — You’ve heard that diabetes hurts your heart, your eyes, your kidneys. New research indicates a more ominous link: that diabetes increases the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease and may speed dementia once it strikes.
Doctors long suspected diabetes damaged blood vessels that supply the brain. It now seems even more insidious, that the damage might start before someone is diagnosed with full-blown diabetes, back when the body is gradually losing its ability to regulate blood sugar.
In fact, the lines are blurring between what specialists call “vascular dementia” and scarier Alzheimer’s disease.
Whatever it’s labeled, there is reason enough to safeguard your brain by fighting diabetes and heart-related risks.
“Right now, we can’t do much about the Alzheimer’s disease pathology,” those sticky plaques that clog patients’ brains, said Dr. Yaakov Stern, an Alzheimer’s specialist at Columbia University Medical Center. But “if you could control these vascular conditions, you might slow the course of the disease.”
Don’t panic if you’re diabetic, said Dr. Ralph Nixon of New York University, vice chairman of the Alzheimer’s Association’s scientific advisory council. Genetics still are the prime risk factor.
“It by no means means that you’re going to develop Alzheimer’s disease, and certainly many people with Alzheimer’s don’t have diabetes,” he cautions.
But the new data strengthen the link and have scientists asking whether diabetes and its related “metabolic syndrome” increase risk solely by spurring brain changes that underlie Alzheimer’s or whether they add an extra layer of injury to an already struggling brain, what Nixon calls “a two-hit situation.”
In a major national study, doctors gave a battery of cognitive tests to nearly 3,000 diabetics. Every 1 percentage point increase in their A1C score — an average of glucose control over a few months — meant small but meaningful drops in tests of memory, the ability to multitask, and other cognitive tasks, Wake Forest University scientists wrote last month in the journal Diabetes Care.
