People With Dementia Are at a Higher Risk of Getting COVID: Study

Can having dementia increase your risk of getting Covid? The answer might just be, yes.

People who are already affected with Dementia are more likely to be infected by Covid than others, finds a study. There is also a higher probability of them being hospitalized or even succumbing to the virus, reported The New York Times.

Moreover, the coronavirus can infect African-American people with Dementia three times faster than Caucasian people, the study published in the Alzheimer's Association’s Journal, suggests.

“This study, highlights the need to protect patients with Dementia, especially those who were black.”

The authors of the study 

This research which was undertaken by researchers at the Case Western Reserve University, observed the health records of 61.9 million people electronically, in the age group of 18 years and above in the United States from 1 February till 21 August in 2020.

Many of them happened to be elderly people residing in nursing home with Dementia, obesity, asthma, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

According to Dr Rong Xu, the senior researcher of this study and professor of Biomedical Informatics at Case Western, this is what led the researchers to examine if people with Dementia had a higher risk of getting infected by the Covid-19 virus.

“We thought, ‘We have the data, we can just test this hypothesis.”

Dr Rong Xu, senior researcher of the study, professor of Biomedical Informatics at Case Western University

The results were in favour of their hypothesis, which concluded that out of 15,770 Covid patients, 810 were suffering from dementia.

Even after considering the demographic factors (age, sex, and race) and the Covid related factors (physical conditions and nursing home residency), people with Dementia have more than three times and two times the risk of contracting Covid, respectively.

Cognitive and physiological factors could be a possible cause for this, according to the experts and authors of this study.

Another important finding that this study shed light on was that people having vascular dementia disorder carry a bigger risk of getting Covid than people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Maria Carrillo, Chief Science Officer of the Alzheimer’s Association and also the head of its journal, Alzheimer and Dementia, observed that Coronavirus infection tends to affect the blood vessels and other parts of the circulatory system.

People with dementia already have damaged vascular system. This results in an increase in the complications in dementia patients post-Covid recovery.

The study highlighted that the chances of Covid patients suffering from dementia being hospitalized were 2.6 times more than those without dementia in the first few months of the pandemic, and they were 4.4 times more likely to die.

Apart from this, of the people having both Covid and dementia, Black people have a higher chance of being hospitalized than White people.

Not much difference was found between the mortality rate of both Black and White patients having Covid along with dementia.

“Folks with dementia are more dependent on those around them to do the safety stuff, to remember to wear a mask, to keep people away through social distancing.”

Dr Kenneth Langa, Medicine professor of University of Michigan

“There is a cognitive impairment and the fact that they are more socially at risk,” he added.

Dr Kristine Yaffe said that the physical weakness in people having Dementia can affect their strength to fight the Covid infection.

The drawback of this study was that there was a lack of socioeconomic data of the patients to have proper information about the patients’ risk levels. Also, the data collected only included patients who reached out for medical care. No data was present of those belonging to an economically backward background, according to Dr. Langa.

The study may be “an underestimate of the greater Covid infection risk to those with dementia,” Dr Langa said.

(With inputs from The New York Time)