An Increased Risk of Dementia Possible in Lupus

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In patients with CNS lupus, early evidence shows the presence of the development of dementia, says Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld of Israel. "Lupus is a disease of young females, so it's not elderly females with dementia at this age."

Neuropsychiatric symptoms have long been known to affect some patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. But now, emerging evidence suggests that lupus patients may be at increased risk of dementia, as well.

​A retrospective study published in April in the journal Arthritis Care and Research used the Taiwan Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2005, a random sampling of the 99.9 percent of Taiwanese citizens covered by the country's national health insurance, to compare dementia rates in people with systemic lupus erythematosus to age- and sex-matched patients without the autoimmune disease. 

​The analysis revealed a doubled rate of dementia in SLE patients. There were 357 cases per 100,00 person-years in the lupus cohort, compared with 180 cases per 100,000 person-years in the non-SLE cohort. {Crude hazard ratio 1.92, 95 percent CI, 1.14−3.23, P< 0.001.)

Dementia is a condition of gradual decline, while neuropsychiatric SLE usually manifests early in the diagnosis, wrote study author Dr. Yu-Ru Lin of Taipei Medical Hospital and colleagues. Antiphospholipid antibodies might put patients at risk of micro-stroke, they hypothesized. Alternatively, anatomical changes in the brain attributable to the disease or corticosteroid treatments may contribute to cognitive decline. [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_crop","fid":"49455","attributes":{"alt":"Yehuda Shoenfeld, M.D.","class":"media-image media-image-right","id":"media_crop_70664887546","media_crop_h":"0","media_crop_image_style":"-1","media_crop_instance":"5982","media_crop_rotate":"0","media_crop_scale_h":"0","media_crop_scale_w":"0","media_crop_w":"0","media_crop_x":"0","media_crop_y":"0","style":"font-size: 13.008px; line-height: 1.538em; float: right;","title":"Yehuda Shoenfeld, M.D.","typeof":"foaf:Image"}}]]

Rheumatology Network spoke with Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, an autoimmunity researcher at Tel Aviv University in Israel, for a deeper look at the dementia-lupus connection. Though not involved with the Taiwanese study, Dr. Shoenfeld has conducted research on lupus autoantibodies and has written about neuropsychiatric lupus in the clinic. He provided his perspective on the need to better understand how lupus might affect the brain.

RN: Obviously, neurologic symptoms are well-known in systemic lupus erythematosus. What is the difference between central nervous system lupus and dementia?

Shoenfeld: There are neurological, physical findings and also X-ray findings in which you see defects in neurological functions, mainly nerves which can be motor or sensory or so forth. It can be represented by conversions. It can be represented by paralysis. It can be presented as paresthesia, which means it feels like ants are going on your body. So it's more in the domain of physical examination. Dementia is more that you lose your capacity for cognition, memory or so forth. You cannot detect it by X-rays, but you can detect it by talking to the patient and listening to him and you can see that he's not finding himself, I would say, in space. So this is a big difference.

What is new about this study by Lin and colleagues?

So far we knew that CNS lupus is quite common, 20 percent of the patients can suffer from that. There are many manifestations of CNS lupus from paralysis to conversion, from deafness to blindness, from paresthesia to pains and so forth. Dementia up until now was not part of the story of lupus - neither in regular lupus nor in CNS lupus. We did have psychotic attack in CNS lupus, which could be completely resolved upon proper therapy, for instance with corticosteroids or immunosuppressive drugs. Suddenly, there is dementia.

Now, I want to remind you that lupus is a disease of young females, so it's not elderly females with dementia at this age. So the people who published the paper came with the idea that in those patients with CNS lupus, you can find, eventually, more dementia, which is a new revelation, not known so far.

With my colleague, Professor Howard Amital [of Sheba Medical Center], an expert on Big Data - we asked the computer to cross the word dementia with SLE in a health database, but we did something else in this respect. We compared it to two other autoimmune diseases. I have to say that, to my great surprise, we have found also that patients with SLE have a threefold increase in dementia. We were not able so far to segregate it to the different factor that we would like to, but we found also with rheumatoid, there was an increase. There was no increase, for instance, in Behcet's syndrome. So most probably, these results are correct, and they should raise a red light. We will analyze our results and we will publish it very soon. But I think it's interesting, even though I had not believed this when I had received the paper from you.

What kind of mechanisms might explain why there could be this link?

When you have an organic damage to the brain, being autoimmune in nature, being the position of autoantibodies, being the position of other factors it causes chronic damage to the brain and eventually, there is some kind expression that above this threshold it can cause the psychological defects which are expressed as dementia. It's like accumulating damage.

Given what is known right now, what is the message for practicing rheumatologists?

Before we do anything with patients, we should confirm the results and indeed analyze what could be the mechanism and then eventually work on this to see how we could prevent this. Maybe, for instance, a very quick recovery should be installed whenever there are any signs of CNS lupus. We have to see if, indeed, it's limited only to patients with CNS lupus. There is a lot to analyze now, to learn, to study and to draw conclusions for the future.

 

References:

Lin Y-R, Chou L-C, Chen H-C, Liou T-H, Huang S-W, Lin H-W. "Increased risk of dementia in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus: A nationwide population-based cohort study." 

Arthritis Care & Research

. 2016. 

doi:10.1002/acr.22914

.

Kivity S, Agmon-Levin N, Zandman-Goddard G, Chapman J, Shoenfeld Y. "Neuropsychiatric lupus: a mosaic of clinical presentations." BMC Medicine BMC Med. 2015;13(1):43. doi:10.1186/s12916-015-0269-8.

 

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