New Research in Medicine: The Face of Dementia in 2011, Part One

As a health care company that strives to make as much of a positive impact on people’s lives as possible, we find it important to keep people up-to-date with new, relevant developments in medicine. Dementia, today’s topic, is something with which we are intimately familiar, dementia care being an integral part of our overall program. Although 2011 may not exactly come to mind as a year of exciting breakthroughs in medicine, research within the last year has yielded a wealth of new information concerning dementia. We would probably need volumes to contain all of the new information from this year alone, so included here are some developments we’ve found to be of particular importance.

One recent research effort by a team of American and Finnish scientists establishes a startling link between smoking and dementia: these scientists found that people who smoke “more than two packs a day” in their middle ages obtain “a greater than 100% increase in the risk of dementia”. These researchers gathered the recent diagnoses of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia of 21,213 people who were middle-aged heavy smokers “between 1978 and 1985”. After the data were gathered and analyzed, it was determined that 25.4% of these people were diagnosed as having some form of dementia.

There is a veritable host of reasons for not smoking, among them cancer and heart disease, and it now seems apparent that we can add dementia to the list. With information like this readily available, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to justify indulgence in tobacco.

Work Cited:

Rusanen, Minna, Miia Kivipelto, Charles P. Quesenberry Jr., Jufen Zhou and
Rachel A. Whitmer. “Heavy Smoking in Midlife and Long-term Risk of
Alzheimer Disease and Vascular Dementia.” Archives of Internal Medicine.
171.4 (2011): 333-339. Print.