Early Stressful Life Events, Which Caused Depression probably are associated with the development of dementia Probably Are Associated With the Development of Dementia - Early Stressful Life Events, Which Caused Depression probably are associated with the development of dementia Probably Are Associated With the Development of Dementia - Open Access Pub

Recently the results of a large, prospective population study, important for the diagnosis and treatment of dementia were presented 1. The authors emphasize their conclusion already in the title of the paper and state “Stressful life events are not associated with the development of dementia”. They discuss many studies, which lead to an opposing conclusion, namely that there is the causal relationship between stressful, adverse life events and the risk of dementia, however they quote also two other papers leading to a denial of such a relationship. DOI10.14302/issn.2474-9273.jbtm-16-1111 Our own investigations on this issue, belong also to those, which support the existence of the causal relationship between adverse events and the onset of cognitive impairment 2 Our survey was carried out among 90 people between 52 and 81 years of age, the participants of so called University of Third Age. Participants of our study, in a conversation with the members of our team responded to 140 items of the elaborated structuralized interview, concerning all sorts of possible risk factors of dementia. Our structuralized interview contains the question related to: 1. Health state, actual therapy, diet and genetic conditioning, 2. Unfavorable events in childhood , in youth and adulthood, 3. Overview of actual possible, negative, stressful influences, 4. Review of the present physical and mental activity, 5. Resources of defense against stress. We performed also some objective measurements. We used so called Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the neuro-psychological test of the efficiency of working memory system accessible on-line, which is an equivalent to so called “Walking Corsi Test” and also the measurements by means of some tools used in psycho-physical laboratories. We measured the time of reaction and the parameters of “visuo – motor ” coordination. We decided to present the preliminary results of our study by choosing 10 participants, who attained the worst values (number of points) in the MOCA and 10 participants who attained the best value in the MOCA . We found that the difference between the number of points for risk factors even for these small samples is statistically significant 2 Our survey has similar drawbacks, enumerated by Sundstr？m in relation to majority of former studies, it means it has partly retrospective design. The sample sizes is small and the measurements of life events are not precise 1. We are convinced however that the discussion and further investigations are necessary, because the question remains open - what makes that only some