Dementia is associated with chronic rhinosinusitis: A population-based case-controlled study

Background: Cardiovascular diseases are reported to be associated with both chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) and dementia. Nevertheless, whether dementia is associated with CRS is still unknown. In the present study, we explored the association between dementia with prior CRS using a population-based data set. Methods: This study used the Taiwan Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2000 as the source of data for a case- control study. We included 8768 subjects with dementia as cases and 8768 age- and sex-matched subjects as controls. We identified cases who had received a diagnosis of CRS before having received a diagnosis of dementia. Conditional logistic regression analyses were performed to examine the association of dementia with previously diagnosed CRS. Results: Results showed that of all sampled subjects, 875 (5.0%) had been previously diagnosed with CRS. A chi-squared test showed that there was a significant difference in the prevalences of prior CRS between cases and controls (6.0% versus 4.0%; p <0.001). The adjusted odds ratio (OR) of prior CRS for subjects with dementia was 1.44 (95% CI, 1.25~1.66) compared with controls. Furthermore, compared with controls, the OR of prior CRS was similar for subjects with dementia for both sexes (the OR for male subjects was 1.48 and OR for female subjects was 1.41). Conclusion: We concluded that subjects with dementia had a higher odds of having had prior CRS than controls. This study implies a potential association between CRS and dementia.