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"Anxiety, especially in older adults, has been relatively understudied compared to depression," said Andrew Petkus, the study's lead author and postdoctoral research associate in psychology at USC Dornsife. "Depression seems more evident in adulthood, but it's usually episodic. Anxiety, though, tends to be a chronic lifelong problem, and that's why people tend to write off anxiety as part of someone’s personality."
The researchers noted that the subjects had self-reported various levels of anxiety, which may or may not meet the clinical diagnostic threshold of a psychiatric anxiety disorder. Even so, the twin who developed dementia had a history of higher levels of anxiety compared to the twin who did not develop dementia.
The subjects with anxiety who later developed dementia "are people that experience more than usual symptoms of anxiety," said study co-author Margaret Gatz, professor of psychology. "They are people who you would say operate at a 'high level of anxiety.' They are frantic, frazzled people."
To determine whether anxiety levels correlated to dementia risk, researchers compared those who reported high anxiety with those who reported lower anxiety levels. "Those in the high anxiety group were about 1.5 times more likely to develop dementia," Petkus said.
People who have high levels of anxiety tend to have higher levels of stress hormones, including cortisol, according to Petkus. Evidence shows that chronically high levels of cortisol damage parts of the brain such as the hippocampus, which stores memory, and the frontal cortex, which is responsible for high-level thinking.
The researchers also found that the anxiety-dementia relationship was stronger among fraternal twins of whom only one developed dementia than it was among identical twins. The researchers said this finding indicates that there may be genetic factors shared by anxiety and dementia that account for the anxiety-dementia risk.
The USC team also hopes to determine whether individuals who have been treated for anxiety earlier in their lives show lower risk of dementia compared with those whose anxiety was not treated.
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Category(s):Anxiety, Cognitive Problems Amnesia / Dementia, Dementia
Source material from USC Dornsife
