On the question of whether OCD can lead to early dementia, in 2021, researchers at the Veterans General Hospital in Taipei, China, found that “people with OCD have an increased risk of developing dementias (such as Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia),” and published their findings in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
Using a large insurance database in Taiwan, the researchers identified people over the age of 45 who had been diagnosed with OCD by psychiatrists and had no history of dementia before their diagnosis, and each OCD patient was compared with 10 non-OCD patients. The final study included 1,347 people with OCD and 13,470 matched control participants.
After controlling for potentially confounding variables, including age, sex, other diseases, income level, and urbanization, the analysis revealed that during the follow-up period:
1.7 percent of people with OCD developed Alzheimer’s disease, compared with 0.1 percent of the control group;
Vascular dementia occurred in 1.1 percent of the OCD patients, compared with 0.2 percent of the control group;
And 3.6 percent of the OCD patients developed dementia with uncertainty, compared with 0.5 percent of the control group.
People with OCD were more than four times as likely to develop dementia.
Male OCD patients were more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease;
Women with OCD are more likely to develop vascular dementia;
This pattern is the opposite of what would be expected in the general population.
In addition, people with OCD were diagnosed with dementia about six years earlier than people without OCD, and early-onset dementia (onset earlier than age 65) was more common in people with OCD.
If this finding is confirmed in other studies, it would be logical to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the relationship between OCD and dementia, the findings argue.