The study, which was published in early March in the medical journal Diabetes Care, found that patients with untreated type 2 diabetes developed dementia and Alzheimer’s disease symptoms faster than medicated diabetes 2 patients and non-diabetics.
“Several diabetes drugs have been linked to protective effects on neurons,” study author Daniel Nation, an psychology processor at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, tells The Post. He says these new findings add to a growing body of research around the “correlation between diabetes and dementia.”
Nation’s team looked at data from 1,289 adults, and compared the spinal fluid of patients with type 2 diabetes — some who were being treated, and some who weren’t — for signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Specifically, they were looking for the presence and progression of “brain tangles,” which are protein clumps that disrupt signals between brain cells in Alzheimer’s patients.
Researchers found that untreated type-2 diabetics showed a worse progression of brain tangles than other study participants.
This raises two possibilities: that untreated diabetes may quicken the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and that diabetes 2 medication may actually help to protect the brain.
If the latter is true, is it possible that taking diabetes medication — such as metformin, the blood-sugar regulator that was most common among study participants — could help people without diabetes as well?
Unfortunately, probably not, says Nation: He theorizes that “the drugs [only] prevent diabetes-related brain injury.”
Still, Nation thinks this research has a crucial takeaway, whether you have diabetes or not: It stresses the “importance of catching diabetes or other metabolic diseases in adults as early as you can,” he says in a press release.
New York Post
