(Press-News.org) A large proportion of dementia deaths in England and Wales may be due to socioeconomic deprivation, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London.
The team also found that socioeconomic deprivation was associated with younger age at death with dementia, and poorer access to accurate diagnosis.
Dementia is the leading cause of death in England and Wales, even during the COVID pandemic, and is the only disease in the top ten causes of death without effective treatment.
The research, published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, examines Office for National Statistics mortality data for England and Wales, and finds that in 2017, 14,837 excess dementia deaths were attributable to deprivation, equating to 21.5 per cent of all dementia deaths that year. The team also found that the effect of this association appears to be increasing over time.
Corresponding author Dr Charles Marshall from Queen Mary University of London, whose work is funded by Barts Charity, said: "Understanding how we might prevent dementia deaths is especially important. Persistent and widening socioeconomic inequality might be having an unrecognised impact on brain health. Addressing this inequality could be an important strategy to help stem the rising tide of dementia."
Various factors have been hypothesised to mediate the relationship between dementia and socioeconomic deprivation, including education, diet, vascular risk factors, stress and access to healthcare.
It is likely that poorer quality of diagnosis in more deprived patients means that they are being disadvantaged in terms of prognosis, counselling, planning of future care, access to appropriate symptomatic treatments and opportunities to participate in research.
The researchers say that although a direct causal relationship between socioeconomic status and dementia has yet to be established, deprivation could be a major target in public health approaches aimed at reducing the population burden of dementia.
The study has limitations in that it is an observational study, meaning that a causal link between deprivation and dementia cannot be confirmed, and there is a lack of detail on specific dementia subtypes within the ONS data which is likely to lead to incomplete ascertainment of dementia cases.
INFORMATION:
Queen Mary's Preventive Neurology Unit is supported by Barts Charity.
ENDS
For more information, please contact:
Joel Winston
Communications Manager
(School of Medicine and Dentistry)
Queen Mary University of London
j.winston@qmul.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)7968 267 064
Notes to the editor
* Research paper: Mark Jitlal, Guru NK Amirthalingam, Tasvee Karania, Eve Parry, Aidan Neligan, Ruth Dobson, Alastair J Noyce, Charles R Marshall. The influence of socioeconomic deprivation on dementia mortality, age at death and quality of diagnosis: a nationwide death records study in England and Wales 2001-2017. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease 2021..
Available here after embargo lifts:
https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad210089
About Queen Mary University of London
At Queen Mary University of London, we believe that a diversity of ideas helps us achieve the previously unthinkable.
In 1785, Sir William Blizard established England's first medical school, The London Hospital Medical College, to improve the health of east London's inhabitants. Together with St Bartholomew's Medical College, founded by John Abernethy in 1843 to help those living in the City of London, these two historic institutions are the bedrock of Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry.
Today, Barts and The London continues to uphold this commitment to pioneering medical education and research. Being firmly embedded within our east London community, and with an approach that is driven by the specific health needs of our diverse population, is what makes Barts and The London truly distinctive.
Our local community offer to us a window to the world, ensuring that our ground-breaking research in cancer, cardiovascular and inflammatory diseases, and population health not only dramatically improves the outcomes for patients in London, but also has a far-reaching global impact.
This is just one of the many ways in which Queen Mary is continuing to push the boundaries of teaching, research and clinical practice, and helping us to achieve the previously unthinkable.
Uncovering detailed travel patterns and habitat use of sharks along and across shelf territories has been historically challenging - especially for most pelagic shark species - which remain offshore for most of their lives. Their vertical diving behavior has been a subject of inquiry for a long time, and for young sharks in particular, has remained elusive.
Using cutting-edge 3D satellite technology, a study led by Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, in collaboration with NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service; OCEARCH; The South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center; and the Wildlife Conservation Society, is ...
Of the many perplexing questions surrounding SARS CoV-2, a mysterious new pathogen that has killed an estimated 2.6 million people worldwide, perhaps the most insistent is this: why does the illness seem to strike in such a haphazard way, sometimes sparing the 100 year old grandmother, while killing healthy young men and women in the prime of life?
A new study by Karen Anderson, Abhishek Singharoy and their colleagues at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, may offer some tentative clues. Their research explores MHC-I, a critical protein component of the human adaptive immune system.
The research suggests that certain variant ...
A NIMS research team devised a new thermoelectric generation mechanism with a hybrid structure composed of thermoelectric and magnetic materials. The team then actually fabricated this structure and observed the record-high thermopower appearing in the direction perpendicular to a temperature gradient (i.e., transverse thermoelectric generation). These results may offer insights into new mechanisms and structural designs applicable to the development of versatile energy harvesting technologies and highly sensitive heat flux sensors.
The Seebeck effect is a phenomenon in which a temperature gradient across a metal or semiconductor is converted into a thermoelectric voltage. Because this effect can be used to convert waste heat into electrical energy, its potential applications (e.g., ...
Through an analysis of cellular components (cell fractions) from malignant ascites (fluid buildup in the abdomen caused by gastric cancer), a research collaboration based in Kumamoto University (Japan) has demonstrated that cellular senescence of cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) play an important role in the peritoneal dissemination of gastric cancer foci (cells different from surrounding cells). This understanding should enable the development of new treatments for cancer dissemination in the peritoneum by targeting cancer cells at focal sites and CAFs in patients with gastric cancer.
Peritoneal dissemination ...
Plant species with short generation times are more sensitive to climate change than those with long generation times. This is one of the findings of a synthesis study by researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ). The international team comprehensively compiled worldwide available data, mostly from Europe and North America, to address the question of how plant populations react to climate change. The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that plant characteristics such as generation ...
Consumption of ultra-processed foods and drink could increase the risk of developing colorectal cancer. This was the conclusion of a large study undertaken by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, based on questionnaires about food behaviours completed by around 8,000 people in Spain. The study, the first of its kind in the country, also analysed the relationship between ultra-processed food and drink products and two other cancers; while no association was observed with prostate cancer, in the case of breast cancer a higher risk was observed in the sub-group of former and current smokers who reported a ...
More extroverted people suffered mood declines while more introverted people saw mood improvements during the early COVID-19 pandemic, in survey of students at a U.S. university.
INFORMATION:
Publicly available article: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0248895
Article Title: "Personality trait predictors of adjustment during the COVID pandemic among college students"
Funding: This work was supported by a grant to Dr. Jim Hudziak from the Conrad Hilton Foundation (https://www.hiltonfoundation.org/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision ...
The question of the origin of the language is one of the most important and at the same time one of the most difficult to solve. It was formulated in antiquity and has inspired religion and philosophy ever since, in some periods, above all the Enlightenment, becoming the axis of reflection on other fundamental issues, such as human nature. In the last few decades, research in this field has intensified, drawing on evolutionism and having an interdisciplinary character, involving linguists, psychologists, primatologists and neuroscientists. The study of language evolution is currently considered one of the most ...
The Covid-19 Crisis is deepening the divide between energy transition frontrunners and laggards. In a new publication, researchers from the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam present an overview of the global impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the energy sector. Their findings show that low- and middle-income countries need more support in their efforts to ditch fossil fuels.
The crisis will heighten existing imbalances in an uneven energy transition landscape. Despite the crisis, frontrunners in the global energy transition will continue to expand their renewable energy capacities, while laggards will fall further behind. In Europe, the Green Deal ...
A new study of mortality among young adults born prematurely includes 6.3 million adults under the age of 50 in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Among this group, 5.4 per cent were born before term, according to Professor Kari Risnes at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine and St. Olavs Hospital.
Researchers used national birth registers and compared them with the cause of death registers that all Scandinavian countries have.
"We already know that preemies have increased mortality in childhood and early adulthood. Now we've confirmed the risk of death from chronic diseases such as heart disease, ...
