Children with asthma are at greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in old age and memory problems in childhood.
According to the World Health Organization, 455,000 people died from asthma-related complications in 2019, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this is the true danger of the disease. However, over the past decade, studies have been published linking some diseases, especially those occurring in childhood, with long-term complications. Some have found a definite statistical link between asthma and the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in old age, and now a new scientific paper has found that it’s possible that memory problems in these patients begin long before old age. If they’re right, asthma may affect the memory of boys and girls who suffer from it. disease.
“Asthma can put children on a path that increases their risk of developing something more serious, like dementia, in adulthood,” said Nicholas Christopher-Hayes, first author of the study and a psychology candidate at the University of California, Davis. In any case, it is too early to take this article as conclusive evidence of such a connection, and as far as we know, there are other risk factors that are more decisive than this one. However, asthma is a relatively common disease, affecting more than 260 million people worldwide, or about 3% of the world’s population. So, the better we understand this relationship, the better we can manage Alzheimer’s disease.
Co-author and UC Davis psychology professor Simone Getty emphasizes that “we increasingly understand that chronic diseases, not just asthma but diabetes, heart disease and others, can put children at greater risk for cognitive impairment (…) We need. understand the factors that may exacerbate or protect against these risks,” and to do this we must start with the basics.. What do we know about these diseases right now?
We know a lot about asthma. This is a chronic inflammatory disease of the respiratory tract. When the ducts become inflamed, they narrow, making it difficult for air to pass through, causing wheezing, chest tightness, coughing… In fact, we even know that it is caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors that make the airways very sensitive to certain irritants, causing inflammation when, for example, pollen, dust or other allergens are present that can initiate an inflammatory response. .
Alzheimer’s disease, on the other hand, is still largely unknown. We know that this is the most common dementia, and we can define it as a neurodegenerative disease in which protein plaques called beta-amyloid and other molecules known as neurofibrillary tangles accumulate in the brain. Some studies suggest that these deposits are a cause of the disease, but the most recent studies do not seem so clear-cut. It is possible that these accumulations are a consequence of the disease, and not the cause, so other causes are also being considered, some of them associated with inflammation. We still don’t know whether the relationship will be mediated by inflammatory issues, but it’s a fairly conservative guess.
In this study, researchers took data from 2,062 children aged 9 to 10 years with asthma, 473 of whom were followed for two years to analyze their cognitive performance on tasks involving episodic memory, which stores our life history. experiences and emotions. According to Christopher Heyer: “Childhood is a period of rapid improvement in memory and cognition in general. In children with asthma, this improvement may be slower.”
And as we said, although we still don’t know the reason for this possible connection, we do know that in rodent studies, certain effects of some asthma treatments were measured on brain structures closely associated with episodic memory: the hippocampus. A priori, there is no cause for concern since the cognitive effects of asthma treatments in mice are not necessarily equivalent to those in humans. Without going into detail, dogs can be poisoned by onions, which are so present in our diet. In any case, this is an interesting line of research aimed at trying to better understand the development of our memory, the occurrence of Alzheimer’s disease and, of course, the still unknown consequences of such a common disease as asthma.
NOT KNOWN:
- The study looked at episodic memory, not data-driven memory, and therefore we cannot draw conclusions about the academic performance of students with asthma simply because they have it.
LINKS (MLA):
- Getty, S., Christopher-Hayes, N., Haynes, S. C., Kenyon, N. J., Schweitzer, J. B., & Merchant, W. (2024). Asthma and memory function in children. JAMA Network Open, 7(11), e242803. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.42803