Diabetes Mellitus and the Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease: A Nationwide Population-Based Study
News Wednesday, February 19th, 2014PLOSONE: 1/29/14
Possible association between diabetes mellitus (DM) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has been controversial. This study used a nationwide population-based dataset to investigate the relationship between DM and subsequent AD incidence.
Methods
Data were collected from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database, which released a cohort dataset of 1,000,000 randomly sampled people and confirmed it to be representative of the Taiwanese population. We identified 71,433 patients newly diagnosed with diabetes (age 58.74±14.02 years) since January 1997. Using propensity score, we matched them with 71,311 non-diabetic subjects by time of enrollment, age, gender, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and previous stroke history. All the patients were followed up to December 31, 2007. The endpoint of the study was occurrence of AD. Read more