If one person in a married couple has dementia, their spouse is at significantly higher risk of developing the disease themselves, Taiwanese researchers said in a study published on Monday.
A nationwide study of nearly 1 million married people from 1998 to 2022 showed that women were 74 percent more likely to develop dementia if their spouse had it, compared with 69 percent for men.
The study, titled “Spousal Dementia Exposure and Risk of Dementia” was published in the international journal JAMA Network Open.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan Catholic Foundation of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia
The researchers, including Wang Shi-heng (王世亨), an associate researcher at the National Health Research Institutes’ National Center for Geriatrics and Welfare Research, analyzed data from the National Health Insurance Research Database of 955,000 married people.
Among spouses whose partners did not have dementia, about six out of every 100 men and three out of every 100 women were diagnosed with dementia, the data showed.
However, if a spouse developed dementia, those figures rose to nine out of 100 for men and six out of 100 for women over a five-year period, the researchers said.
Similar associations were also found for Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, they said.
Relative risks were more prevalent among younger spouses, while the absolute increase in dementia cases was greater among older spouses, they said.
Among the possible explanations for the correlation was assortative mating — in which people tend to select a spouse with a similar educational background, socioeconomic status and health behaviors — alongside shared environmental and lifestyle exposures accumulated over their lives, the researcher said.
The link might also be due to caregiver distress, depression, sleep disturbance, social isolation, metabolic dysregulation, inflammation and adverse health behaviors from living with a spouse with cognitive decline, they said.
Lower-income households and those with fewer children had larger absolute risk differences, they said.
The study does not suggest that caring for a spouse with dementia causes dementia, but rather that people in that situation are in a statistically high-risk group that requires more attention, Wang said.
The link likely reflects shared lifestyle factors, overall health status and the long-term stresses associated with dementia caregiving, said Wu Chi-shin (吳其炘), a senior attending physician and researcher at the institutes, and a corresponding author of the paper.
Once a person is diagnosed with dementia, healthcare support should extend to include their spouse, including assessments of cognitive function, depression, sleep quality and chronic disease management, the researchers said.
Priority should be given to low-income families, households with few children and families lacking alternative caregivers, they added.
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