Misleading Headline and Story on Anxiety and Dementia

"Staying Calm 'Prevents Dementia," is the headline on a BBC article today. Seems like an innocuous headline but in fact it is both wrong and misleading.

As a group, older people who scored as "calm and relaxed" in their answers to a survey had a 50% lower risk of developing dementia over the next six years, the BBC reported. (There's another no-no: giving a relative risk figure without giving the absolute risk number.)

But if you go to the abstract of the actual study in the journal Neurology (by Dr. Hui-Xin Wang, et al), you find the authors actually reported something quite different. Anxiousness (or in their terminology "high neuroticism") was NOT linked to an increased risk of dementia. The increase in risk occurred only if the person was also socially isolated.

Even with that caveat in mind, finding an association between anxiety in the social isolated and developing dementia does not mean a) that there is a cause-and-effect relationship or b) that mitigating the cause will reduce the effect.

Anxiety in the presence of social isolation might increase the risk of dementia or it and dementia may both be markers of some other condition or this may all be coincidental. Similarly, is the social isolation a "cause" of dementia or a "consequence" of it? It is a fact of life that other people tend to shy away from those with dementia.

In any event, even if an anxious disposition increases the risk of dementia, there is no evidence from this study that anxious people who become calm--through meditation, taking medication, etc--will lower their risk of dementia. Or that having lots of friends will decrease the risk of dementia.

On the other hand, you can make a strong argument that calming your anxiety and making more friends will improve your quality of life--whether or not you develop dementia.