People 65 and older who were diagnosed with anxiety have a higher risk for being diagnosed with dementia. And they’re more apt to receive a dementia diagnosis if they take a benzodiazepine, new research finds.
A team from Saint Louis University School of Medicine looked at health data from 72,496 people 65 and older between 2014 and 2021. The scientists found that taking benzodiazepines continuously was linked to a 28% increased risk for developing dementia. Commonly used benzodiazepines include diazepam (Valium), alprazolam (Xanax) and clonazepam (Klonopin). The study appeared last month in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
Still, experts aren’t sure if giving older adults benzodiazepines could raise their risk for dementia. In older adults, anxiety can be tied to depression, social withdrawal, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, lack of physical inactivity, sleep problems, smoking, obesity, alcohol consumption and more.
“As a clinician who frequently treats patients with anxiety disorders, recent studies suggesting benzodiazepine use could contribute to dementia were very concerning to me,” said Jay A. Brieler, MD, associate professor of family and community medicine the University, and an author of the report. “I had the assumption that if a benzodiazepine was used and side effects occurred, simply stopping the medication would remedy the problem over time.
“The difficult issue with those studies is that anxiety itself is also associated with dementia. It was still unclear from the literature whether the disease or the treatment was the culprit. Based on our work, it appears that both are playing a part, but it remains uncertain how the two interact with each other.”
Giving benzodiazepine to older people is somewhat of a controversy. Using them is linked to falls and short-term cognitive impairments. Many nursing home residents take benzodiazepines.
The authors called for more studies to determine whether the dementia link is different when people take other anxiety medications.
