Researchers say that a type of heart rhythm disorder known as atrial fibrillation may increase the risk of dementia, but it appears that the treatment of this condition with drugs that increase blood liquidity limits this risk.
Atrial fibrillation increases the risk of dementia by 40 percent and increases the risk of dementia and mixed dementia by nearly 90 percent, the team found in a new study.
But the study, published in the Journal of Neurology, reported that patients taking anticoagulants had a 60 percent lower risk of dementia.
"We found that atrial fibrillation may experience a faster decline in cognitive performance such as thinking and remembering and are more likely to develop dementia than others," said Mutso Ding, a senior researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
"We noticed that older people with atrial fibrillation who received blood clots, which prevent clots within the heart and move them to the brain, were less likely to develop dementia than those who did not."
In the case of atrial fibrillation, there is a disturbance in the electrical signals in the heart muscle which leads to the tremor of the heart rather than the normal contraction. As a result, the blood does not move properly within the heart, leading to clots that may be transmitted to the brain and cause a stroke.
