- Regular use of the internet by older people is associated with a significant reduction in the risk of developing dementia, according to a recent study.
- The study also found a “sweet spot” for internet use of up to 2 hours a day, beyond which the risk of developing dementia is likely to increase.
- According to experts, support should be offered to older people to use new online technology and tackle barriers to access.
A new study explores the effect of internet use among older people as a means of preventing dementia.
The study finds that older individuals who regularly use the internet are nearly half as likely to develop dementia as those who do not regularly use the internet.
For an average of 7.9 years — and for up to 17.1 years — the authors of the study tracked the cognitive health of 18,154 adults who did not have dementia. The people in the study were 50 to 64.9 years old at the start of the study.
Regular internet users had a 43% reduced risk of developing dementia compared with non-regular users. By the end of the study, 4.68% of the individuals had been diagnosed with dementia.
The study also suggested that the beneficial effects of internet use depended on the degree to which people were online, presenting a U-curve of the data.
Those who never went online or were there more than two hours remained at a higher risk of dementia. However, the authors caution that small sample sizes prevented the observation of significant differences between user groups.
The authors of the study also looked at whether educational attainment, race-ethnicity, sex, and generation impacted the association between internet use and dementia risk. They found the risk of dementia did not vary based on these factors.
The study is published in the
According to Dr. Scott Kaiser, a specialist in geriatric family medicine at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute, not involved in this study, “there was sort of a sweet spot that if you were on…
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