Walking slower is an early sign of dementia

Dementia refers to the gradual decline of mental abilities caused by… Serious behavioral disordersWhich leads people who suffer from it to forget daily tasks, lose the ability to recognize people or things, or even in advanced stages, forget to eat or walk.

According to data from the Spanish Society of Neurology (SEN), More than 50 million people around the world suffer from some type of dementiawhich is the number that is expected increase in the coming years. It should be noted that about 30% of cases are not diagnosed.

And this is one of the major challenges for the scientific community today, Improving and accelerating early diagnosis And treat this disease as soon as possible, thus minimizing its effects. Learn how to identify Early symptoms can help achieve this.

In this sense, a study was published in The JAMA Network is open Reveal a A new early sign of dementia This has to do with the speed at which we are going.

This research, which used a group of more than 16,000 healthy older people in Australia and the United States, is linked to… Decreased gait and cognitive function with increased risk of dementiaWhich was greater in people who showed deterioration in both gait and memory.

“These findings highlight the importance of walking in assessing dementia risk, and suggest that a dual decrease in walking speed and a measure of memory may be important.” The best combination for future dementia assessmentnote the researchers of the study.

As they explain, previous studies had already found that a double-digit decline in walking speed and cognition was associated with an increased risk of dementia, but it was not clear. How has the regression affected ‘in specific areas’?. That’s why they sought to examine “the associations between the dual decline in walking speed and cognition, that is, global memory, processing speed and verbal fluency, with dementia risk.”

Thus, after evaluating the association between the double decline in walking speed and 4 different cognitive measures, they noted that “the double decline in walking speed and both cognitive measures was associated with Increased risk of dementia “Compared to people who didn’t regress, or those who only regressed cognitively, or those who only slowed down.”

The researchers also concluded that these results Support the inclusion of walking speed in screening assessments From the risk of dementia.