A new study suggests that long-term use of certain medications, including multiple types of anticholinergic medications, could lead to a higher risk of dementia.
In a study published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal, a team of researchers from the University of East Anglia reviewed over 40,000 medical records of patients aged 65-years-old and above who were diagnosed with dementia between April 2006 and July 2015. The data was compared against the medical records of close to 284,000 people who didn’t suffer from the condition, with the researchers also looking at over 27 million prescriptions. According to BBC News, this made the study the largest of its kind to examine the link between long-term use of anticholinergic drugs and the risk of dementia.
Based on the researchers’ analysis, the patients who were diagnosed with dementia were up to 30 percent more likely to have been given prescriptions for certain types of anticholinergic drugs, with the link to dementia becoming stronger as patients were exposed more frequently to the medications.
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