"Obesity is one of the main risk factors for dementia"
NBC News interviewed Dr. Roch Nianogo about research that found the top threats to Americans today regarding dementia in old age.
NBC News interviewed Dr. Roch Nianogo, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health assistant professor of epidemiology, for the NBC LX channel about research that found the top threats to Americans today regarding dementia in old age are obesity, physical inactivity and lack of a high school diploma.
“We wanted to see if the risk factors that we’d found before had changed over time, and if there was a difference between different races and ethnicities,” Nianogo said. “We were intrigued by the different factors that actually increased over time; for example, mid-life obesity was not part of the top three risk factors (previously), and this time around it was one of the top three risk factors for dementia.”
The current research – “Risk Factors Associated with Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias by Sex and Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.” – is pending in a print edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association’s Neurology, but is available on-line.
Faculty Referenced by this Article
Dr. Joseph Davey is an infectious disease epidemiologist with over 20 years' experience leading research on HIV/STI services for women and children.
Robert J. Kim-Farley, MD, MPH, is a Professor-in-Residence with joint appointments in the Departments of Epidemiology and Community Health Sciences
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Research by study lead author, Dr. Roch Nianogo, finds modifiable risks are linked to more than one in three cases of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia in the U.S.
Source: JAMA Neurology Read Full Article