Biologics linked to lower dementia rate in older patients with IBD
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
SAN DIEGO — Older patients with inflammatory bowel disease who were treated with biologics exhibited a lower incidence of dementia compared with those never treated with biologics, according to data presented at Digestive Disease Week 2022.
“When we looked at a national database, what we found was an increased rate of dementia among IBD patients,” Ahmed Eltelbany, MD, an internist at the Cleveland Clinic, told Healio. “[However,] when we further stratified our study to look at the biologic use among these patient groups, we found that the group that used biologics had a decreased prevalence of dementia compared to the group that did not receive biologics.”
To examine the prevalence of dementia among IBD patients, Eltelbany and colleagues reviewed data from the Explorys Inc. database, which includes electronic health record data from 26 major integrated U.S. health care systems. They then identified all patients aged older than 65 years diagnosed with either Crohn’s disease (n = 41,860) or ulcerative colitis (n = 45,530) between 2016 and 2021. Of those, 5,450 CD patients and 3,510 UC patients were treated with biologic therapy.
In addition to examining common dementia risk factors, the researchers then assessed the prevalence of dementia in IBD patients compared with patients with no IBD diagnosis. Drilling down further into the data, they compared the prevalence of dementia among IBD patients who had and had not received biologic therapy.
According to study findings, the prevalence of dementia was 10.8% for patients with CD and 7.8% for patients with UC vs. 5.4% among those without IBD (P < .001).
However, Eltelbany and colleagues found that dementia prevalence was significantly lower for patients with CD treated with biologics (4.2%) compared with those who did not receive biologics (11.7%); similarly, patients with UC treated with biologics were less likely to be diagnosed with dementia (4.8%) compared with those who did not receive biologics (8%) (P < .001).
“We have been interested in looking at the brain-gut relationship in many inflammatory diseases and immune-mediated diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, and there is some thinking that inflammation promotes a neurodegenerative process of dementia,” Miguel Regueiro, MD, FACG, AGAF, chair of the Digestive Diseases and Surgery Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, told Healio. “What we didn't predict is that there was a medicine relationship with an inverse relationship of dementia in the biologic-treated patients.”
Regueiro added that “we can’t say cause and effect, but the hypothesis is that decreasing inflammation would potentially decrease neurodegenerative disorders, such as dementia. We’re not saying we should use biologics to treat dementia, but it is an interesting association that merits further study.”
Collapse
Eltelbany A. Abstract Mo1545. Presented at: Digestive Disease Week; May 21-24, 2022; San Diego (hybrid meeting).
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts