Large Study Shows People with Dementia Are at Higher Covid-19 Risk by Theresa Machemer for Smithsonian Magazine February 12, 2021.

Caregiving Network has a comprehensive video about dementia: https://youtu.be/cPUBn3R8EdE

Dementia may present both physical and social risk factors that make transmission more likely.

Analysis of millions of health records has found that people with dementia are more likely to catch severe Covid-19, according to a study published on February 9 in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia.

The study found that in the first six months of the pandemic, patients with dementia and Covid-19 were more than twice as likely to be hospitalized than those without dementia, and over four times as likely to die, Pam Belluck reports for the New York Times. When risk factors like age, heart disease and asthma were taken into account, the data still show that people with dementia are twice as likely to have caught Covid-19 during the first six months of the pandemic.

“Folks with dementia are more dependent on those around them to do the safety stuff, to remember to wear a mask, to keep people away through social distancing,” says University of Michigan professor of medicine Kenneth Langa, who was not involved in the study, to the New York Times. “There is the cognitive impairment and the fact that they are more socially at risk.”

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