People 60 years and older who had been taking a glitazone for at least a year to treat their type 2 diabetes had an 11 percent reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia and a 57 percent reduced risk of vascular dementia than people with diabetes who did had been treated with metformin. The effect was particularly clear in patients who were younger than 75 years. This underscores the importance of early prevention of dementia, the researchers note in the journal BMJ Open Diabetes Research & Care.
Since vascular dementia, in which regions of the brain are less well supplied with oxygen due to changes in the blood vessels, does not occur as frequently as Alzheimer’s disease, the risk of dementia was calculated to be 22 percent lower overall. When metformin and a glitazone were taken together, the risk of dementia was eleven percent lower than when metformin was taken alone. If the diabetes was treated with an active substance from the sulfonylurea class, the risk of dementia was even increased by twelve percent.
The research team evaluated data from 559,106 diabetics who had been observed for an average of eight years. Glitazones are also called “insulin sensitizers” because they improve the sensitivity of the body’s cells to insulin so that they can absorb glucose from the blood better.
Which: DOI 10.1136/bmjdrc-2022-002894