Weight loss linked to dementia in women

Women who develop dementia experience weight loss up to ten years before the onset of symptoms of the disease, new research has found.

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in the US studied 560 women who were diagnosed with dementia between 1990 and 1994 as well as a similar group without dementia and tracked their weight for the preceding 30 years.

Lead researcher David Knopman said that their findings revealed that “the weight of those women who developed dementia was drifting downward many years before the onset of symptoms”.

He said: “[The findings] point to changes that occur before the memory loss and mental decline in dementia. We believe that the brain disease began to interfere somehow with maintenance of body weight, long before it affected memory and thinking.”

Dr Knopman added that the cause of weight loss could be due to women having less initiative and interest in eating as well as experiencing a duller sense of taste and smell.

The fact that similar weight loss was not identified in men has been linked with postmenopausal hormonal changes.

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said that the difference in weight loss between men and women in this study is “interesting as low oestrogen levels in women have been shown to increase the risk of dementia”.

The Mayo Clinic researchers said that the results would not be useful for diagnosis of dementia but could prove beneficial if scientists are able to “pinpoint the brain mechanisms influencing the weight loss in women who develop dementia in order to better understand how it develops”.

Ms Wood added: “These findings need to be taken further urgently as they may reveal how dementia develops and therefore provide routes to the new treatments we so desperately need.”

Dementia is a neurological disease which affects the ability to think, speak, reason, remember and move. The most common forms of dementia include Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia.

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