Commonly used drugs for problems like colds, allergies, depression, high blood pressure and heart disease have long been linked to cognitive impairment and dementia. Now researchers have some fresh evidence that may help explain the connection.
The drugs, known as anticholinergics, stop a chemical called acetylcholine from working properly in the nervous system. By doing so, they can relieve unpleasant gastrointestinal, respiratory or urinary symptoms, for example.
The list of such drugs is long. Among them: Benadryl for allergies, the antidepressant Paxil and the antipsychotic Zyprexa, Dimetapp for colds and the sleep aid Unisom. In the new analysis, researchers looked at brain scans and cognitive test results from 451 older adults - including 60 who had been taking anticholinergic drugs for at least a month. The study participants were about 73 years old on average.
None of them had been diagnosed with cognitive problems like Alzheimer's disease or dementia.
But brain scans of people who used anticholinergic drugs showed lower levels of glucose processing in the brain - an indicator of brain activity - in a region of the brain associated with memory that's also affected early in the course of Alzheimer's disease.
In addition, patients who used these medications had reduced brain volume and thickness in some regions linked to cognitive function, the researchers report in JAMA Neurology.
People who used these drugs also scored lower on tests of immediate memory recall and executive function compared to people who weren't using these drugs, researchers found.
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