OCD increases risk for any dementia, Alzheimer’s disease

Obsessive-compulsive disorder independently increased risk for subsequent dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, according to results of a nationwide longitudinal study published in Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

“In the 2000s, some evidence suggested a potential link between OCD and dementia, especially Alzheimer’s disease,” Mu-Hong Chen, MD, PhD, of the department of psychiatry at Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan, and colleagues wrote. “[Researchers] assessed the obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCSs) between patients with Alzheimer’s disease and controls and found that lifetime and current OCSs were significantly more prevalent in patients with Alzheimer’s disease than in controls.”

Despite prior research into the link between OCD and dementia, the exact relationship remains unclear, according to Chen and colleagues. In the current study, they used the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database to obtain data of 1,347 patients with OCD according to ICD-9-CM diagnosis who were aged 45 years or older, and 13,470 controls matched via age, sex, residence, income and dementia-related comorbidities. They included participants between 1996 and 2013 to assess subsequent dementia from enrollment to the end of 2013. To evaluate the risk for dementia between the OCD and control groups, they applied stratified Cox regression analysis on each matched pair, with the analysis for the current study conducted in 2018.

Results showed an increased risk for developing any dementia (HR = 4.28; 95% CI, 2.96-6.21), Alzheimer’s disease (4.04; 95% CI, 1.55-10.54) and vascular dementia (HR = 3.95; 95% CI, 1.7-9.18) among patients with OCD compared with controls.

“Future research on the pathogenic mechanisms and molecular underpinnings of the relationship between OCD and dementia may lead to the development of novel therapeutics,” Chen and colleagues wrote.