Additional screening
Gregory Day, MD, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Fla., said that the findings help fill a void in the research about stress and cognition.
“It’s a potentially important association that’s easy for us to miss in clinical practice,” said Dr. Day, who was not a part of the study. “It’s one of those things that we can all recognize impacts health, but we have very few large, well thought out studies that give us the data we need to inform its place in clinical decision-making.”
In addition to its large sample size, the overrepresentation of diverse populations is a strength of the study and a contribution to the field, Dr. Day said.
“One question they don’t directly ask is, is this association maybe due to some differences in stress? And the answer from the paper is probably not, because it looks like when we control for these things, we don’t see big differences incident risk factors between race,” he added.
The findings also point to the need for clinicians, especially primary care physicians, to screen patients for stress during routine examinations.
“Every visit is an opportunity to screen for risk factors that are going to set people up for future brain health,” Dr. Day said. “In addition to screening for all of these other risk factors for brain health, maybe it’s worth including some more global assessment of stress in a standard screener.”
The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute on Aging. Dr. Kulshreshtha and Dr. Day report no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.