Diabetes may impair mental function in Elderly
By: Unknown
Reuters Medical News, June 14, 2001
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Jun 14 - Elderly women with
type 2 diabetes are at greater risk of developing memory problems than
other elderly women, study results suggest.
However, diabetes treatment appeared to slow the loss
of mental function, according to a report published in the June issue of Diabetes
Care.
"These results add to the importance of
preventing diabetes and controlling diabetes," principal investigator
Dr. Francine Grodstein, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, told Reuters
Health.
Dr. Grodstein and her colleagues administered four
cognitive function tests to more than 2,300 women who were 70 to 78 years
old. They found that, as a group, the 82 women with type 2 diabetes scored
slightly lower than nondiabetic women on each of the four tests, and they
were more than twice as likely to have a low score on the combination of
all the tests. Increased duration of diabetes increased the risk of poor
test scores.
"Based on calculations within the women in our
study, we found that having diabetes was equivalent to aging 4 years in
terms of scores [on one of the four tests]," Dr. Grodstein's group
reports.
About 38% of the diabetics were receiving drug
therapy, and this subgroup had test scores similar to those of women
without diabetes. This indicates, the researchers suggest, that treatment
may help prevent a decline in cognitive function in type 2 diabetics.
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