About 55 million people worldwide suffer from dementia. Known symptoms, which are slow to set in, are forgetting where you placed an object, names, or difficulty planning.
But they are not the only ones. In addition to hearing difficulties, which a recent study has shown can also herald dementia, scientists have also discovered some symptoms that can appear more than a decade before diagnosis, writes Science Alert. And it’s not even a new discovery. Unfortunately, it is rarely used nowadays.
A study done in Australia years ago suggests that measuring grip strength and mobility are two potentially useful and inexpensive ways to assess dementia risk in older women.
In the study, the subjects – approximately 1,200 women in their 70s – were tested for grip strength, using a hand dynamometer, as well as mobility, using a timed test in which the person in question stood up from the chair and walk 3 meters, then turn around to sit back on the chair.
The tests are not new, having been used since 1998 as part of the Perth Longitudinal Study of Aging in Women. They were repeated five years later, and the health status of the participants was followed for the next 14.5 years.
During that time, nearly 17% of women were hospitalized with dementia or died of a dementia-related cause.
Although the observational study could not show which is cause and which is effect, the researchers found a clear link between physical strength and mobility and dementia occurring a decade later.
Unfortunately, doctors warn, such tests, although simple and cheap, are not used, even if their effectiveness has been proven.
“Both grip strength tests and timed function tests are not routinely performed in clinical practice, but both are simple and inexpensive screening tools,” said Marc Sim, from Edith Cowan University in Perth (Australia ), lead author of the study over 20 years ago.
2023-05-09 03:42:00
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