The news comes from a study published February 9 in
Alzheimer's & Dementia, the journal of the Alzheimer's Association, and found that people with dementia are at a greater risk of contracting COVID-19 and experiencing severe disease than those without.
For the study, researchers at Case Western Reserve University analyzed almost 61.9 million electronic health records of people age 18 and older in the US, from February 1 through August 21, 2020. The data came from 360 hospitals and 317,000 health care providers across all 50 states, representing a fifth of the US population.
Old age, living in a nursing home, and having conditions like asthma, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity, are known risk factors for COVID-19, per the study. But even after adjusting for those factors, the researchers found that Americans with dementia were still twice as likely to have been infected with COVID-19 as those who don't have dementia. And regarding severe disease for COVID-19 patients with dementia, researchers found that they were 2.2 times more likely to have been hospitalized within the first six months of the pandemic, and 4.4 times more likely to have died from the disease.