Capitalising on modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer's disease

摘要

With a rising prevalence of dementia around the world, there is an urgent need to identify opportunities for prevention. In The Lancet Neurology, Sam Norton and colleagues present a model that estimates the modifiable component of the risk of Alzheimer's disease in relation to seven key risk factors. Building on an earlier study by Barnes and Yaffe, they estimate that one in three Alzheimer's disease cases worldwide is attributable to diabetes, midlife hypertension, midlife obesity, physical inactivity, smoking, depression, or low educational attainment, taking into account the frequent co-occurrence of these factors. Based on this estimate, they show-in their most optimistic scenarios-that relative reductions in the prevalence of each of the seven risk factors of 20% per decade might reduce the number of cases of Alzheimer's disease in 2050 by 15.3%, which would translate into a reduction in the number of individuals with Alzheimer's disease from the 106 million expected without intervention to 90 million worldwide by 2050.