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Older Adults With a Delirium Episode Have 3 Times the Risk of Dementia in 5 Years
Hospitalized older adults with at least 1 episode of delirium had triple the risk of an incident dementia diagnosis within 5 years of follow-up compared with those without a delirium diagnosis, according to a study published online in The BMJ.
“A dose-response association between delirium and dementia supports a causal pathway between the two conditions, encouraging the search for accelerated and de novo pathways to neuronal injury and the development of new treatment strategies,” wrote corresponding author Emily H. Gordon, MBBS, PhD, of the University of Queensland and Princess Alexandra Hospital, Queensland, Australia, and study coauthors.
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The observational study included 55,211 hospitalized adults in New South Wales, Australia, aged 65 years and older with a documented episode of delirium. Participants were matched for age, sex, frailty, hospitalization reason, hospital length of stay, and intensive care unit length of stay with a hospitalized adults without delirium. Researchers followed all patients in the study for more than 5 years to see how many were diagnosed with incident dementia.
The mean age of patients was 83.4 years. Over 5.25 years of follow-up, 58% of patients died, and 17% received a new dementia diagnosis, according to the study.
The risk of death was 39% higher for patients with delirium than for patients without delirium, researchers found. The risk of dementia was 3 times higher for patients with delirium. Each additional delirium episode was linked with a 20% increase in dementia risk.
The study also showed a stronger association between delirium and dementia among men than women, the study found.
“Differences in the association between delirium and incident dementia in men and women reinforce the need to not only adjust for gender in future studies but also to look for gender specific associations that might have important mechanistic and clinical implications,” researchers wrote. “Delirium is a factor that could triple a person’s risk of dementia. Therefore, delirium prevention and treatment are opportunities to reduce dementia burden globally.”
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