Dementia and ethnicity: five minutes with . . . Charles Marshall

“If you are black in east London, you are 43% more likely to develop dementia than a white person. And if you are South Asian, you are 17% more likely to develop dementia.1 Our research has found that ethnicity and deprivation are independently associated with dementia risk, so it’s not just that there’s a relationship between ethnicity and deprivation. When we adjust for the major modifiable risk factors, it doesn’t really change the effect. So it doesn’t look like this is because of factors such as blood pressure and cholesterol, smoking, depression, hearing loss, and so forth. When we look at the proportion of dementia cases that might be attributable to each of these factors, we can see that around 12% of dementia cases in east London are because of people being from minority ethnic groups and 15.6% are because of being in the bottom 20% of deprivation. That suggests…
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