Prevalence and Risk Factors of Cognitive Deficits and Dementia in Relation to Socioeconomic Class in an Elderly Population of India

Summary: Study of dementia and pre-dementia in India, how it relates to behavioural and economic factors, difficulties of doing such research, all with expected results

Interestingness: 1

Paper by RB Singh, R Singh Rao, AS Thakur, S Srivastav, MA Niaz and SN Shinde in the Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine, Volume 2, Issue 2, Summer 1999.


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The abstract is a perfect summary of the results. The paper mainly describes the process of the survey and how it had to be changed to make it work in India. The results are pretty much what I expected, except for the alcohol intake correlation.

It comes with an appendix with the questions in the survey. That bit is fun, even though the results are a little bit troubling.
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Abstract follows:

We attempted to find the association between age-related cognitive deficits or dementia and socioeconomic class or other risk factors, using a cross-sectional random survey of 595 elderly subjects ages 50-84 years in an urban population of Moradabad, India. The prevalence of cognitive deficit was 18.6% and was significantly higher in men than women (22.3% vs 14.6%; P < 0.05). There was a greater prevalence of cognitive deficits in lower socioeconomic classes. The prevalence of cognitive deficit, including dementia, has become a public health problem in India and is significantly associated with lower socioeconomic class, higher age, smoking, malnutrition, and alcohol intake in men.