Traumatic brain injury linked to increased dementia risk

Older military veterans who have suffered a serious head injury are more likely to be diagnosed with dementia than uninjured veterans, according to a new study.

The report looked at traumatic brain injury (TBI), which includes concussions, skull fractures and bleeding inside the skull.

There have been a fair number of previous studies that have looked at the relationship between TBI and risk of dementia, and some have found an association while others haven't, said lead author Deborah E. Barnes, from the University of California, San Francisco and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

She and her colleagues sought to clarify the relationship by taking into account other conditions, like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

And we found that, even after accounting for these other factors, older veterans with a history of TBI were 60 percent more likely to develop dementia, Barnes told Reuters Health in an email.

Dementia affects five percent of people in their 70s and 37 percent of those in their 90s, according to past research.

For the new study, the researchers examined the medical records of more than 188,000 U.S. veterans ages 55 and older who had undergone a medical evaluation between 2000 and 2003 and did not have dementia at the time.

The veterans all visited the doctor again at least once between 2003 and 2012.

According to their records, 1,229 of the veterans had been diagnosed with TBI. Between 2003 and 2012, 196 of those with a history of TBI developed dementia, or 16 percent, compared to 18,255 of the veterans without TBI, or 10 percent.

Veterans with TBI also developed dementia an average of two years earlier than those without TBI, according to results published in Neurology.

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Traumatic brain injury linked to increased dementia risk