Cerebral palsy bears potentially increased hazard of dementia

Adults with cerebral palsy (CP) are at higher risk of developing dementia compared with the general population, but this risk is likely driven by CP comorbidities rather than a direct effect of having the disorder, a study reports.

The analysis included 1,703 adult CP patients and 5,109 matched controls. The mean baseline was 33.30 years, and 46.8 percent of the sample were female. Compared with controls, CP patients more often had a higher annual number of GP visits and a diagnosis of stroke, epilepsy, and/or sensory impairment.

A total of 72 incident cases of dementia were documented, of which 19 occurred in the CP group over a median of 7.15 years of follow-up and 53 in the control group over a median of 10.95 years of follow-up. These translated to incidence rates of 0.0013 and 0.0009 per 1,000 person-years, respectively.

On unadjusted Cox proportional hazards regression analysis, CP was associated with a more than twofold increased risk of developing dementia (hazard ratio [HR], 2.69, 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 1.44–5.00).

However, the association was attenuated after controlling for CP comorbidities (sensory impairment, intellectual disability, and epilepsy; HR, 1.92, 95 percent CI, 0.92–4.02).

The study provides the first evidence that adults with CP may have an elevated risk of being diagnosed with dementia compared with the general adult population, but additional investigations are needed to establish whether this risk might be explained by CP comorbidities.

Furthermore, the findings should be interpreted with caution due to the low number of incident cases of dementia.