Background: Dementia is a prevalent condition in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients. While Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) is often employed as complementary therapy for glycemic control, its effect in controlling likelihood of dementia has not yet been fully elucidated.
Aim: To compare the risk of dementia between T2DM patients with and without CHM treatment.
Methods: We undertook a nested case-control study and obtained data on patients 20-70 years of age who received medical care for T2DM between 2001 and 2010 from the National Health Insurance Research database in Taiwan. Cases, defined as those with dementia that occurred at least one year after the diagnosis of T2DM, were randomly matched to controls without dementia from the study cohort at a 1:1 ratio. We applied conditional logistic regression to explore the associations between CHM treatment and dementia.
Results: A total of 11699 dementia cases were matched to 11699 non-dementia controls. We found that adding CHM to conventional care was related to a lower risk of dementia [adjusted odds ratio (OR) = 0.51], and high-intensity CHM treatment was associated with an adjusted OR of 0.22.
Conclusion: This study shows that the cumulative CHM exposure was inversely associated with dementia risk in an exposure-response manner, implying that CHM treatment may be embraced as a disease management approach for diabetic patients to prevent dementia.
Keywords: Chinese herbal medicine; Dementia; Nested case-control study; Odds ratio; Type 2 diabetes mellitus.
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