A Common Drug Could Lower Your Dementia Risk By 35 Percent, New Research Shows
There has been a lot of chatter over the past year about the positive impacts of diabetes medications—like Ozempic—on a slew of serious health conditions. Now, there’s a new type of prescription joining the conversation—and it may lower your chances of getting dementia.
A recent study found that a class of medications called SGLT-2 inhibitors—which does not include Ozempic or similar drugs like Zepbound—significantly lowered the risk of dementia in people with type 2 diabetes.
Taking a diabetes medication to lower your risk of dementia seems like a big leap, but people with the condition are already at a higher risk of developing it. Here’s what you need to know about the latest findings, plus what’s behind this link.
Meet the experts: Pouya Shafipour, MD, a board-certified family and obesity medicine physician at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California. Jamie Alan, PhD, an associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Michigan State University.
Why are people with diabetes at a higher risk of dementia?
There is a known link between type 2 diabetes and dementia, with data suggesting that people with type 2 diabetes have a 50 percent greater risk of losing cognitive function. The association is most strongly tied to vascular dementia, which refers to "changes to memory, thinking, and behavior resulting from conditions that affect the blood vessels in the brain," per the National Institute on Aging.
This link is still under investigation, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). But people with type 2 diabetes seem to be at a higher risk if their blood sugar isn’t well-managed.
Research suggests that having too much glucose in the body may increase production of beta-amyloid, which proteins that clump together to form plaques in the brain that have been linked to Alzheimer's disease.
What did the study find?
The study, which was published in BMJ on August 28, analyzed data from the Korean National Health Insurance Service database, which included 110,885 people with type 2 diabetes between the ages of 40 and 69. All of those patients were either taking oral diabetes medications SGLT-2 or DPP-4 inhibitors for their condition. SGLT-2 helps the kidneys remove excess glucose from the body through urine, while DPP-4 works by deactivating the two main hormones that regulate blood sugar levels.
After 670 days, there were 1,172 new diagnoses of dementia among the study participants. When compared with people who took DPP-4 inhibitors, those who took SGLT-2 inhibitors had a 35 percent lower chance of developing dementia. Not only that, they had a 52 percent lower risk of vascular dementia, and a 39 percent lower risk of Alzheimer’s dementia.
People who took SGLT-2 inhibitors for longer periods of time seemed to have the best results. “SGLT-2 inhibitors might prevent dementia, providing greater benefits with longer treatment,” the researchers concluded in the study.
How do SGLT2 inhibitors work?
SGLT-2 inhibitors are a class of medications that treat type 2 diabetes. The medications help keep the kidneys from reabsorbing too much glucose and allow you to pee it out instead of circulating that glucose back into your blood, Alan explains.
“They are on the gold standard treatment list for congestive heart failure, too,” she says.
Why did the drug lower dementia risk?
This study didn’t explore why people had a lower risk of dementia on SGLT-2 inhibitors—it simply found a link. However, it may simply be that people on these medications had better blood sugar control, says Pouya Shafipour, MD, a board-certified family and obesity medicine physician at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California.
“Anything that stabilizes or lowers blood sugar and lowers a prolonged hyperglycemic state will help with this,” he says. “SGLT-2 has been found to be very helpful with that.” (Hyperglycemic means high blood sugar, in case you're not familiar with the term.)
Jamie Alan, PhD, an associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Michigan State University, agrees. “Lowering blood sugar would theoretically help dementia, particularly vascular dementia,” she says. “However, there is a lot about these drugs that we don’t know.”
Do other diabetes drugs (like Ozempic) have a similar effect?
It’s not clear yet. However, initial research conducted on semaglutide (the active ingredient in Ozempic) and other forms of GLP-1 drugs (the class of medications that Ozempic belongs to) has found that they may lower the risk of dementia.
One study published in December 2022 found that semaglutide lowered the risk of dementia in patients with type 2 diabetes. Another study found that fellow GLP-1 medication liraglutide may protect against dementia.
Are the results applicable to Americans?
This particular study was conducted on people in Korea—not America—and those are two different populations of people. However, experts say these results will likely apply to Americans, too.
How can people with diabetes lower their dementia risk?
It’s too soon to say that you should start taking an SGLT-2 inhibitor to lower your risk of dementia if you have diabetes. However, doing your best to control your blood sugar is often your best bet for lowering your risk of dementia, Shafipour says. That can include doing things like exercising regularly, eating a healthy diet that’s lower in refined carbohydrates, getting enough sleep, and doing your best to manage your stress, he says.
And, if you’re doing all of that and still struggling with blood sugar management, it may be time to rope in your doctor to talk about next steps.
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