The relationship between Alzheimer’s disease and cancer has been studied on several occasions, now Neurology has published the largest study on the subject and seems to confirm that people with Alzheimer’s disease have a lower risk of developing cancer. In addition, the study also shows that cancer patients have a lower chance of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
The main author of the study, Massimo Musicco, from the Italian National Research Council, explained that they saw that: “the risk of dementia among individuals with cancer decreased by 35% and the probability of cancer in patients with neurodegenerative disease decreased by 43%”. And to see this they conducted the study on 204,468 people aged 60 years or more, the follow-up was done for six years and of all of them 21,451 ended up developing cancer while 2,832 were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Conclusions were drawn from the evolution of this population.
New treatments
Musicco highlighted the importance of the study “given that the incidence of cancer and dementia increase exponentially with age, understanding the mechanisms underlying this relationship could help us to develop new and better treatments for both diseases”. Even so, the study’s author has cautioned that “the possibility that the presence of one disease could obscure the diagnosis of other diseases because new symptoms could be interpreted as a consequence of the already diagnosed disease, or in the case of cancer, people may assume that memory problems are a side effect of chemotherapy, needs to be controlled for.”
More articles on Alzheimer’s disease:
Alzheimer’s, a dementia that is difficult to combat. Dr. Pablo Casariego