Alzheimer's: Older people who've had COVID-19 may be at significantly higher risk
Medical News Today spoke with Dr. Pamela Davis, the study’s co-author, a physician, and the Arline H. and Curtis F. Garvin Research Professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. Dr. Davis said the research team elected to do this study because they were interested in COVID-19’s impact on the brain and wondered if older people who contract COVID-19 might be at a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
“Many people believe that for Alzheimer’s disease there is a combination of factors that work together to give you the cognitive impairment, and we were concerned that the kinds of things that happened during COVID-19 — the intense inflammation, and perhaps the kinds of direct action on the brain of the of the virus — might be a risk factor,” Dr. Davis said. “So we went looking for that in our study.”
In 2021, Dr. Davis worked with a team of researchers on another studyTrusted Source, which found that individuals with dementia had a greater risk of contracting COVID-19 and being hospitalized and dying from the disease than those without dementia.
Findings from the new study suggest that there may be “bidirectional relationships” between COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s disease.