A September 26th article in The New York Time’s New Old Age blog cited, 2000 Center of Excellence Fellow and 2005 Beeson Scholar, Malaz Boustani, M.D.
As a featured expert in this article, Dr. Boustani praised the methods used by French and Canadian researchers on a study connecting Anxiety Drugs to increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The studies found that long-term use of benzodiazepine based medications resulted in a 51 percent increased risk of developing dementia.
While it is not yet clear whether this relationship is a causation or a correlation, Dr. Boustani believes the research methods used were sound. By studying patients who had started use of the drugs 5 – 10 years before developing symptoms of dementia, the researchers limited the risk of this being a case of “reverse causation bias,” meaning that the prescription of the benzodiazepine drug was likely not related to misdiagnosis of pre-dementia symptoms.
Dr. Malaz Boustani, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Indiana University’s Division of General Internal Medicine & Geriatrics.
For vetted resources on Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia visit our our online resource InfoAging.org.
