Can daily egg intake reduce the risk of dementia development in elderly?

A recent study published in the recent issue of Nutrients journal showed that taking one egg per day may reduce the risk of dementia, while taking more or less eggs may have the opposite effect. Due to the global aging population, dementia has emerged as a significant public health concern with an annual occurrence rate of 10 million, dementia affects about 55 million people worldwide. By 2050, there will be 152 million dementia sufferers worldwide. Since there is now no recognized treatment for dementia, public health prioritizes primary prevention as a way to lower the prevalence of dementia and slow its development.

The body of studies on the relationship between dietary variables like eating fish, and dementia incidence and prognosis is growing, while efforts to prevent dementia are focused on other modifiable risk factors, like smoking, depression, and exposure to air pollution. In order to ascertain the independent relationship between egg intake and dementia, Precious Igbinigie and colleagues carried out this population-based case-control research in China.

From the community health care clinics and the dementia management system in Guangzhou, China, this research randomly selected 233 people with dementia and 233 persons without dementia. Their food intakes during the previous two years and other risk factors for chronic illnesses were examined. The frequency of egg intake was divided into four categories as Monthly, Weekly, Daily, ≥Twice a day, and Non-consuming.

• The study found that dementia participants were more likely to eat eggs at monthly but less likely to do so on a daily basis in contrast to controls. When compared to daily egg intake, the age-adjusted odds ratio (OR) for dementia was 1.76 in people who consumed eggs weekly and 4.34 in those who ingested them monthly.
  
• Yet, no noteworthy correlations were discovered for the categories of Non-consumption. The corresponding ORs were 2.10, 4.82, 0.73, and 4.16, respectively, after additional adjustments for gender, family income, education, alcohol use, smoking, dietary intakes, cardiovascular disease, and other co-morbidities.
• An inverse relationship between egg intake and dementia was found among people who consumed eggs on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis. The multiple adjusted OR of dementia was 0.48 for each average increase in egg consumption. The OR for weekly intake was 0.44 and for every day was 0.22 when compared to monthly usage.

Overall, this study revealed that daily egg intake may lessen the risk of dementia. However, the link between non-consumption/monthly or twice-a-day consumption and dementia requires additional research.

Source:

Igbinigie, P. O., Chen, R., Tang, J., Dregan, A., Yin, J., Acharya, D., Nadim, R., Chen, A., Bai, Z., & Amirabdollahian, F. (2024). Association between Egg Consumption and Dementia in Chinese Adults. In Nutrients (Vol. 16, Issue 19, p. 3340). MDPI AG. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16193340