Marriage linked to lower risk for dementia, mild cognitive impairment

Not in my case, getting divorced was the best thing.

Marriage linked to lower risk for dementia, mild cognitive impairment

Marriage was associated with a lower risk for dementia and mild cognitive impairment in later life, researchers reported in the Journal of Aging and Health.

“Earlier studies suggest that being married in later life protects against dementia, and that being single in old age increases the risk of dementia. We examine midlife marital status trajectories and their association with dementia and mild cognitive impairment,” Vegard Skirbekk, PhD, of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, and colleagues wrote.

Marriage was associated with a lower risk for dementia and mild cognitive impairment in later life. Source: Adobe Stock

Skirbekk and colleagues evaluated six different marriage trajectories – unmarried, continuously divorced, intermittently divorced, widowed, continuously married and intermittently married – using multinomial logistic regression. They said they looked at marital status in the 4^th to 6^th decades of life “as opposed to a one-time ‘snapshot’ of marital status” as well as clinical dementia and mild cognitive impairment status after age 70 years.

Study participants were garnered through a general population sample that was linked to population registries (n = 8,706). The authors estimated relative risk ratios (RRR) and then used mediation analyses, which were adjusted for education, number of children, smoking, hypertension, obesity, physical inactivity, diabetes, mental distress, as well as having no friends in midlife.

According to the authors, 11.6% of all subjects were diagnosed with dementia, while 35.3% were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. They found the highest prevalence of dementia among the unmarried (14.1%) and the lowest among the continuously married (11.2%).

In addition, dementia prevalence was higher for those unmarried (RRR = 1.73; 95% CI, 1.24-2.4), continuously divorced (RRR = 1.66; 95% CI, 1.14-2.43) and intermittently divorced (RRR = 1.5; 95% CI, 1.09-2.06), compared with those who were continuously married, the researchers wrote.

According to a counterfactual scenario the authors created, in which all participants had the same risk of receiving a dementia diagnosis as those who were continuously married, there would be 6% fewer dementia cases overall, they wrote.

“Our study draws further attention to marital histories as a predictor of later-life cognitive impairment and the potential mediating roles of having children, health and social risk factors,” Skirbekk and colleagues wrote. “Information on the link between marital status and later-life cognition could be useful for individuals as they consider the benefits and costs of different family forms, although we highlight that our results do not allow us to identify causal effects.”