Approximately 19% of the participants developed dementia during the follow-up period. Participants with lower BMD at the femoral neck were 12% more likely to develop dementia and 14% more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Within the first ten years following the baseline assessment, scientists found that participants in the lowest tertile of bone mineral density (specifically, those with the lowest femoral neck BMD, total body BMD, and trabecular bone scores) were most likely to develop dementia.
More research is needed to see if bone mineral density helps protect individuals from developing dementia, but we hypothesize that vitamin D might have something to do with it.