Declining Dementia Rates May be Due to Generational Differences in Lifetime Lead Exposure
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Declining dementia rates may be due to generational differences in lifetime lead exposure
To the medical community's surprise, several studies from the US, Canada, and Europe suggest a promising downward trend in the incidence and prevalence of dementia. Important risk factors for dementia, such as mid-life obesity and mid-life diabetes, have been increasing rapidly, so the decline in dementia incidence is particularly perplexing.
A new hypothesis by University of Toronto Professor Esme Fuller-Thomson, recently published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, suggests that the declining dementia rates may be a result of generational differences in lifetime exposure to lead. U of T pharmacy student ZhiDi (Judy) Deng, co-authored the article.
While the negative impact of lead exposure on the IQ of children is well-known, less attention has been paid to the cumulative effects of a lifetime of exposure on older adults' cognition and dementia. Given previous levels of lead exposure, we believe further exploration of the of this hypothesis is warranted."
Fuller Thomson, director of the Institute of Life Course and Aging and professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work
[...] The authors suggest that next steps to assess the validity of this hypothesis could include: comparing 1990s assessment of blood lead levels to current Medicare records, assessing lead levels in teeth and tibia bones (which serve as proxies for life-time exposure) when conducting post-mortems of brains for dementia, and examining the association between particular gene variants associated with higher lead uptake and dementia incidence.
"If lifetime lead exposure is found to be a major contributor to dementia, we can expect continued improvements in the incidence of dementia for many more decades as each succeeding generation had fewer years of exposure to the neurotoxin," says Deng.
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