Assessing the Impact of Overactive Bladder Medications on Cognition

Emerging literature has associated the use of anticholinergic medications to cognitive decline.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the association of overactive bladder medications on cognitive function with prospective longitudinal cognitive assessments.

A population-based cohort of individuals 50 years and older who had serial validated cognitive assessment, in accordance with the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging, was evaluated from October 2004 through December 2021. Anticholinergic overactive bladder medications were grouped by traditional anticholinergic medications and central nervous system (CNS)- sparing anticholinergic medications and compared to no medication exposure. A linear mixed effects model with time-dependent exposures evaluated the association between overactive bladder anticholinergic medication exposure and subsequent trajectories of cognitive z-scores.

We included 5,872 participants with a median follow-up of 6.4 years. Four hundred forty-three were exposed to traditional anticholinergic medications, 60 to CNS-sparing medications, and 5,369 had no exposure. On multivariable analyses, exposure to any anticholinergic overactive bladder medication was significantly associated with deterioration in longitudinal cognitive scores in the language and attention assessments compared to the control cohort. Traditional anticholinergic medication exposure was associated with worse attention scores than nonexposed participants. Exposure to CNS-sparing anticholinergic medications was associated with a deterioration in the language domain compared to those unexposed. Among women, traditional anticholinergic medication exposure was associated with worse global and visuospatial scores than nonexposed participants, but this association was not identified in the CNS-sparing group.

Exposure to anticholinergic overactive bladder medications was associated with small but significantly worse decline in cognitive scoring in the language and attention domains when compared to nonexposed individuals.