…Researchers followed more than 3400 participants who were 65 years of age or older for an average of 7 years. They were interested in seeing if the use of anticholinergic drugs, especially really chronic use, was associated with an increased risk of dementia or Alzheimer’s. The top line results were that those who used anticholinergic drugs had a significantly increased risk (hazard ratio 1.54) of dementia if they had at least 1095 standard daily doses of these drugs. That’s where the “more than 50% increased risk” comes from.

But let’s unpack. That’s a relative risk increase. What’s the actual increase? That’s hard to tease out, because they don’t report the actual rates of Alzheimer’s or dementia in the two groups, only the number of incidents per person years of follow up. For instance, you can tell from Table 3 that in the high users of these drugs, there were 184 cases of dementia for 4022 person years of follow up (or 0.46 cases per 10 person years) versus 136 cases per 5618 person years of follow-up in users who never used the drugs (or 0.24 cases per 10 person years). But that’s before adjustment.

These drugs are also all not the same. Here’s the full list of drugs: …

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