High or low HDL tied to slightly elevated risk for dementia
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- Adults with the highest and lowest levels of HDL (“good cholesterol”) had more risk for dementia than people with average levels.
- There was no relationship between LDL (“bad cholesterol”) levels and dementia.
Older adults with high levels or low levels of HDL had a small increased risk for dementia compared with those with average levels, researchers reported in Neurology.
There was no association between LDL level and dementia risk.
Image: Adobe Stock
“Previous studies on this topic have been inconclusive and this study is especially informative because of the large number of participants and long follow-up,” Maria Glymour, ScD, chair of the department of epidemiology at Boston University, said in a press release. “This information allowed us to study the links with dementia across the range of cholesterol levels and achieve precise estimates even for people with cholesterol levels that are quite high or quite low.”
Glymour and colleagues analyzed data from 184,367 people (mean age, 70 years; 55% women; mean HDL, 53.7 mg/dL; mean LDL, 108 mg/dL) from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health plan who were aged 55 years or older and did not have dementia at baseline, who completed a health behavior survey from 2002 to 2007 and who had cholesterol levels measured within 2 years after survey completion. Participants were divided into quintiles based on HDL and LDL levels.
During a mean follow-up of 8.77 years, the researchers observed 25,214 cases of incident dementia.
Compared with people from the middle quintile of HDL, those in the lowest quintile (HR = 1.07; 95% CI, 1.03-1.11) and those in the highest quintile (HR = 1.15; 95% CI, 1.11-1.2) had increased risk for dementia, Glymour and colleagues found.
There was no relationship in the overall cohort between LDL level and dementia risk, but in statin users, high LDL was associated with a modest elevated risk for dementia (HR per 10 mg/dL increase = 1.01; 95% CI, 1.01-1.02), whereas in statin nonusers, high LDL was associated with a modest decreased risk for dementia (HR per 10 mg/dL increase = 0.98; 95% CI, 0.97-0.99), according to the researchers.
The researchers found evidence for an effect modification for age with linear HDL (P = .003).
“The elevation in dementia risk with both high and low levels of HDL cholesterol was unexpected, but these increases are small, and their clinical significance is uncertain,” Glymour said in the release. “In contrast, we found no association between LDL cholesterol and dementia risk in the overall study cohort. Our results add to evidence that HDL cholesterol has similarly complex associations with dementia as with heart disease and cancer.”
Reference:
- Both high and low HDL cholesterol tied to increased risk of dementia. https://www.aan.com/PressRoom/Home/PressRelease/5117. Published Oct. 4, 2023. Accessed Oct. 4, 2023.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts