Association of Balance Impairment with Risk of Incident Dementia among Older Adults

A growing body of data suggests that balance impairment may be linked to the onset of dementia.

However, a large-scale epidemiologic investigation is needed to clarify its association in older adults.

A retrospective-prospective hybrid database.

Cox proportional hazards regression model was used to assess the relationship between balance impairment and the risk of incident dementia, and the results were provided as adjusted hazard ratios (aHR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). All participants were tracked until the date of incident dementia, death, or 31 December 2019 whichever came first.

We analyzed 143,788 older adults who had at least one health screening between 2009 and 2019 from the Korea National Health Insurance Service-Senior Cohort.

A total of 3,774 cases of dementia were discovered throughout 850,425 person-years of follow-up investigation. Balance impairment was associated with a risk of dementia compared to those without balance impairment (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 1.83; 95% CI, 1.69-2.00; P value <0.001).

Risks of the Alzheimer's disease (aHR, 1.80; 95% CI, 1.65-1.96; P for trend <0.001) and the vascular dementia (aHR, 2.94; 95% CI, 1.89-4.58; P for trend <0.001) showed comparable trends and findings.

Balance impairment was found to be independently associated with an increased risk of dementia in older adults.