Dementia is a group of conditions that impairs the brain, affecting over 47.5 million sufferers worldwideand 3 million US cases per year. Americans fear dementia like few other diseases. With sudden memory loss, language changes, memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning all seemingly effects of the disease, dementia impossible to ignore as a cultural phenomenon.

What the media hasn’t covered at length is the increasing data pointing to links between depression and dementia. New studies and evidence are exposing a strong link between depression, dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. The key to predicting and preventing dementia, Baby Boomer’s most feared disease, may be staring back at us in the form of America’s most common mental illness, depression.

Depression & Dementia

Signs of depression may be an early sign that dementia is developing in the brain before the telltale signs of memory loss appear. High levels of depression prior to a dementia diagnosis have been linked to more drastic decreases in thinking and memory skills later on. Researchers from Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands found that elderly people who developed increasingly worse depressive symptoms were more likely to develop dementia.

Researchers examined 3,325 fifty-five-and-over people as part of a population study dating back to 1990. Their goal was to examine the tentative link between depression and dementia. They found that 21% of people whose depressive symptoms increased over time were eventually diagnosed with dementia. By comparison, only 10% of people with “low symptoms of depression” developed dementia.