A new study shows that the risk of suffering from cognitive impairment and dementia increases if you suffer from chronic pain such as arthritis, cancer or back pain for more than three months.
Reports show that the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory and learning, is 1 year older in a 60-year-old with chronic pain, compared to people without pain. CNN.
Pain points increased danger
When pain was located in two places in the body, the hippocampus shrank even more, corresponding to more than two years of age, estimates in a new study show.
The study found that increasing the number of pain points on the body also increased the risk. In people with pain in five or more sites, the size of the hippocampus was approximately four times smaller than in people with only two pain sites.
We need to treat the pain
“Asking people about any chronic pain conditions and advocating for care by a pain specialist may be a modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline that we can address proactively,” says the Alzheimer’s researcher. Richard Isaacson to CNN.
He is a preventive neurologist at the Florida Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases and was not involved in the new study.
People in pain did worse
In this study, researchers analyzed data from more than 19,000 people who underwent brain scans as part of the British Biobank, a long-running British study of more than 500,000 Britons aged 40 to 69.
In the new study, researchers found that people with pain in multiple body locations performed worse than people without pain on seven out of 11 cognitive tasks.
People with pain in only one part of the body performed worse on only one cognitive task.
Stronger pains were also affected
People with more pain were more likely to have reduced gray matter in areas of the brain that affect cognition, such as the prefrontal cortex and prefrontal lobe, which are areas affected by Alzheimer’s disease.
According to a 2016 study, 45 percent of Alzheimer’s patients live with chronic pain.
Low back pain has been a leading cause of disability for many years worldwide, and neck pain is also common. Scientists estimate that more than 30 percent of the world’s population suffers from chronic pain, according to CNN.
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