Consuming too much sugar is linked to dementia, according to a new study.
The report, which was published Thursday in BMC Medicine, named excessive sugar intake as a culprit that’s associated with dementia. If older individuals can keep sugar consumption within recommended levels, it may have a role in preventing dementia, the authors wrote.
Researchers evaluated data on 210,832 participants from the UK Biobank with an average age just over 56. The team assigned sugar intake and high-sugar dietary scores to classify sugar intake. Absolute sugar intake was identified by the Oxford WebQ in the UK Biobank, while relative sugar intake was measured by dividing the absolute sugar intake by total diet energy.
The high-sugar dietary pattern included a high-level consumption of fresh and dried fruit as well as sugar-sweetened beverages.
“Many fresh fruits are repositories of various bioactive compounds that were reported to play a neuroprotective role and potentially mitigate the adverse impacts of sugar, potentially leading to the underestimation of the association between sugar and Alzheimer’s disease,” the authors wrote. The pattern they calculated gave them more details on foods instead of isolated nutrients, the team wrote. Other types of carbohydrates could have an effect; they only studied sugar, the authors noted.
The participants completed at least one questionnaire — and didn’t have dementia. Specifically, the team focused on all-cause dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Increased absolute sugar intake was significantly associated with a higher risk of all-cause dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Relative sugar intake also showed significant associations with all-cause dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and a high-sugar dietary score was only significantly associated with a higher risk of all-cause dementia. Among sugar types, sucrose was most robustly linked to developing all-cause dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, the data showed.
Sugar intake and high-sugar dietary pattern’s effect on all-cause dementia and Alzheimer’s disease was only substantial in those 56 to 65 years old, but not among those younger or older. The effect of sugar intake on dementia seemed to be more noticeable in women, the data showed.
How does sugar potentially lead to forms of dementia? Eating too much could cause hyperglycemia and insulin resistance in the brain, which interrupts normal function and drives neurodegeneration “consequently through a variety of mechanisms,” the authors wrote. (High sugar can also change gut health, which has a role, the team added.)
