Poster Session Abstracts from the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA) Partners Forum and Science Days 2024

Plain Language Summary: Antidepressants are common and taken for a long time.Our goal was to determine if antidepressants increase dementia risk.We included frailty, sex, and how long participants were taking antidepressants as potential factors in dementia risk.Our results suggest that antidepressants do not increase the risk of dementia, but that frailty, being male sex, and older age do in the population studied. Background:In Canada, antidepressant medications (ADM) are the largest drug category in terms of prescription volume.Previous study of the relationship between ADM exposure and dementia is inconsistent.The objective of this secondary analysis was to investigate the relationship between frailty, sex, duration of ADM exposure, and the development of clinical dementia. Method:This was a retrospective cohort study of the Religious Orders Study.Participants' health data was collected annually from enrollment to death.A 24-item frailty index was created.ADM use was defined as exposure to any antidepressant annually.Dementia was defined clinically as either Alzheimer's disease or another primary cause; excluding mild cognitive impairment.A general logistic regression model was used to assess the role of the variables: age, frailty, sex, ADM exposure, and duration of ADM exposure, on the outcome of dementia.Result: There were 1828 participants, 26% were male.The mean age was 89.76.1.Preliminary results of a multivariable logistic regression model indicated that neither ADM exposure nor duration of ADM use was associated with an increased the risk of dementia.Three of the variables in the model revealed a statistically significant relationship to the development of dementia: age (OR: 1.09, 95%CI (1.03, 1.15)), sex (OR: 2.27, 95%CI (1.14, 4.47)), and frailty (OR: 9.08, 95%CI (1.99, 3983.37)). Conclusion:Our findings conclude that neither ADM use nor increased duration of ADM use was associated with dementia.Future work will investigate if ADM exposure is related to the development of dementia related neuropathology.