LAGOS, Nigeria(VOICE OF NAIJA)-A recent study by Florida State University researchers, headed by Postdoctoral Researcher-Neurology, Avinash Chandra, has shaken up the conventional wisdom that married people are less likely to develop dementia.
Contrary to a 2019 study from America that found that unmarried people had “significantly higher odds of developing dementia over the study period than their married counterparts”, this latest study contradicts, suggesting that unmarried individuals, particularly those who are divorced or never-married, may have a lower risk of developing dementia.
At the start of the research which used one of the biggest samples to examine this issue, data from over 24,000 Americans who lived without dementia were tracked for up to 18 years. The results from the study showed that divorced and never-married individuals had a reduced risk of dementia compared to their married counterparts.
According to the study, being unmarried led to a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease which is the most common form of dementia. However, this association wasn’t observed for vascular dementia, a rarer form of the condition.
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“Divorced or never-married people were less likely to progress from mild cognitive impairment to dementia and that people who became widowed during the study had a lower risk of dementia,” the study discovered.
To explain findings, the researchers proposed that one theory linked to it is that, married people may be more likely to be diagnosed with dementia earlier, due to their partners noticing memory problems and pushing for medical attention, which they called “ascertainment bias”.
As mentioned in the paper, such dynamics may “provide a more nuanced understanding than a simple binary effect”.
The study’s results challenge the long-held assumption that marriage is automatically beneficial for brain health. Instead, it suggests that the impact of relationships on dementia risk is complex and multifaceted.
Therefore, the study implies that what matters most may not be marital status, but rather how supported, connected, and fulfilled an individual feels in the marriage. This nuanced understanding of relationship dynamics could help explain the contradictory results of marriage being beneficial and shed new light on the factors influencing dementia risk.
