Researchers suggest that patients over the age of 65 who have survived COVID-19 are as much as 80 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, within a year of contracting the virus.
The data has been published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. Co-author Doctor Pamela Davis wrote: “Since infection with SARS-CoV-2 has been associated with central nervous system abnormalities, including inflammation, we wanted to test whether, even in the short term, COVID could lead to increased diagnoses.”
As part of the research, the team examined the health records of more than six million people over the age of 65 who had had medical treatment between February 2020 and May 2021; it is important to note none of these patients had Alzheimer’s when the study began.
In the year after their infection, 400,000 patients had developed Alzheimer’s disease and had twice the risk of the disease than those who had not had Covid.
