Diabetes Raises Risk of Vascular Dementia in Women

Individuals with type 2 diabetes are 60% more likely to develop dementia than those without diabetes. Furthermore, for vascular dementia, the risk is higher in women.

In a study to determine whether sex-specific relationships exist between women and men with diabetes and incident dementia, researchers did a meta-analysis of 14 studies including 2,310,330 individuals and 102,174 dementia case patients.
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In multiple analyses, diabetes was associated with a 60% increased risk of any dementia in both sexes. Diabetes-associated relative risk for vascular dementia was 2.34 in women compared to 1.73 in men. The diabetes-associated relative risk for nonvascular dementia was the same for either sex.

Overall, women with diabetes had a 19% greater risk of developing vascular dementia than men.

The complete study is published in Diabetes Care.

—Pooja Shah

Reference:
Chatterjee S, Peters S, Woodward M, et al. Type 2 diabetes as a risk factor for dementia in women compared with men: a pooled analysis of 2.3 million people comprising more than 100,000 cases of dementia. Diabetes Care. 2015 Dec 17 [epub ahead of print] doi: 10.2337/dc15-1588.