Are there telltale signs of Alzheimer’s disease several years before the first manifestations of the pathology even appear? According to French researchers, the answer is yes. They even made a list.
Despite the growing number of discoveries, knowledge regarding the risk factors and the very early first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease remains fragmentary. Would it be possible to analyze the possible risk factors well before the diagnosis of dementia?
This is the difficult task undertaken by French researchers*. And by analyzing the medical records of nearly 40,000 patients with Alzheimer’s disease and as many control subjects, they managed to develop a mathematical model.
Warning signs, 15 years before the disease
Which allowed them to draw up a list of the 10 most common conditions encountered in patients… 15 years before the first signs of the disease!
Depression tops the list. Followed by :
- Anxiety;
- Exposure to high stress;
- Hearing loss;
- The constipation ;
- Ankylosing spondylitis;
- Memory loss;
- Tiredness ;
- The falls ;
- Sudden weight loss.
“Our work confirmed known associations, such as hearing problems or depression,” note the authors. “But he also highlighted other lesser-known factors or early symptoms, such as cervical spondylosis or constipation. The question remains whether these health conditions are risk factors, symptoms or warning signs of disease.”
Although these results still need to be refined, they are valuable for health professionals who might tackle these signs as soon as they are detected and thus hope to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
*Multidisciplinary team of researchers from the Aramis project of the Paris Brain Institute (INSERM/CNRS/Sorbonne University), INSERM/University of Bordeaux, and Cegedim Health Data.
