• Posted June 30, 2025

Could Your Address Determine Your Dementia Risk?

Your address might influence your risk for dementia, a new study says.

People living in poor neighborhoods appear to be more likely to have biological risk factors for inflammation and Alzheimer’s disease, researchers reported June 25 in the journal Neurology.

“These results suggest that neighborhood disadvantage increases the risk of inflammation, which may play an early role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as biomarkers for the disease itself,” senior researcher Angela Jefferson said in a news release. She’s director of the Memory and Alzheimer's Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.

For the study, researchers tracked 334 people with an average age of 73 for up to nine years, taking blood tests, brain scans and thinking and memory evaluations at regular intervals. About 180 people from the group also had samples of spinal fluid drawn.

People who lived in areas with greater neighborhood disadvantage — lower employment, less income, less education, more disability — were more likely to have elevated levels of tau, results showed.

Tau is a protein related to Alzheimer’s disease, researchers noted. The brains of people with advanced Alzheimer’s frequently feature toxic tau tangles.

“This observation suggests that living in more disadvantaged neighborhoods may result in more stressful exposures that drive neurodegeneration, resulting in an increased risk for developing Alzheimer's disease,” Jefferson said.

Further, the spinal fluid of participants had elevated levels of a biomarker related to inflammation, researchers found.

Greater neighborhood disadvantage was related to faster increases in levels of high sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-established marker for inflammation, results showed.

The more disadvantage a neighborhood had, the higher residents’ CRP levels increased year-by-year, researchers reported.

“Based on these results, healthcare providers may consider neighborhood disadvantage when they are working with people who could benefit from strategies to reduce inflammation levels through lifestyle interventions, such as stress reduction techniques and exercise,” Jefferson said.

These results could be driven by the toxic stress faced by people struggling to get by, researchers said. This stress could increase inflammation, which in turn causes tau proteins to turn toxic.

“Continued efforts should also be made to include people who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods in studies on prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease,” Jefferson added.

However, researchers noted that this study cannot prove a direct cause-and-effect link between poverty and dementia, only an association.

More information

Duke University has more on poor neighborhoods and dementia risk.

SOURCE: American Academy of Neurology, news release, June 25, 2025