Vascular Risk Factors and Mood/Anxiety Symptoms as Risks of Dementia

Interactions between vascular risk factors and persistent mood and anxiety symptoms for risk of incident dementia: A longitudinal cohort and neuroimaging study

Inaara M. Ebrahim, Maryam Ghahremani, Richard Camicioli, Eric E. Smith, Zahinoor Ismail

Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS; i.e., depression, apathy, sleep disorders, anxiety) are risk factors for dementia. Mild behavioral impairment (MBI) is a syndrome that improves specificity of NPS for dementia prediction by identifying emergent and persistent NPS in older adults as the at-risk group. Affective dysregulation is a subset of MBI characterized by persistent mood and anxiety symptoms. These affective symptoms are a marker of dementia risk.

Previously, we examined the effects of race, baseline cognition, and APOE (the most common gene associated with late-onset Alzheimer's disease) status on incident dementia in association with MBI-affective dysregulation in dementia-free older adults. To do this, we used data from the National Alzheimer Coordinating Centre which is a database with over 45,000 participants. Our preliminary analyses consisted of 3,698 dementia-free participants. These analyses demonstrated that persistent affective (mood/anxiety) symptoms are associated with 1.76x greater risk of incident dementia compared to no NPS.

Building on these findings, the objective of the current study will be to incorporate vascular risk factors such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes, obesity, and smoking, into our analyses and examine the risk associated with them. We will also explore interactions between vascular risk, age, education, sex, race, and NPS status to determine stratum specific differences in risk. These results can inform public health policy and clinical care on addressing vascular risk factors in older adults with mood and anxiety symptoms for dementia prevention.

__________________________________________________

Inaara Ebrahim is a fourth year student at the University of Alberta. She is currently completing her Bachelor of Arts (Honors) in Psychology. For her honours thesis, she is working at the Song Bird Neuroethology Lab, where she gets to spend time taking care of, and researching chick-a-dees and zebra finches! She is also a VAST funded scholar, conducting summer research under Dr. Zahinoor Ismail, investigating neurodegenerative diseases. Outside of school and research, she volunteers with South Asian Youth Mental Health, an organization looking to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health in the South Asian community in Calgary. What a superstar!