Benzos and future dementia??

....Im recovered after ten years of Benzo use, and 13 years of pharamceutical medication with very few breaks in between. All I can do is wonder if it's too late or if I'll get Allzheimers or Dementia when I'm older.

Is anyone else worried about this? Is there a way to counteract dementia??

 

Does anyone have any good information on any of this?

 

I am living proof that the brain does heal. It's been two years since my withdrawal, and I still feel better and better each day. I wonder to what extent it heals though?

 

I have heard that before age 40, the brain has a better chance of healing up, and I stopped at 27. 

 

I do still have an anxiety problem. There was a reason I was on benzos to begin with. I am so worried about my future.

 

I feel fine now, but will it some uknown consequences rear their heads at me when I age??

 

Has anyone out there been on long term Benzos and is now much older and still doing okay??

 

I am scared and angry at doctors for allowing these medicines in my life and the lives of others.

Congrats on getting off the drugs and healing! You might now benefit from some cognitive behavioral therapy to help you learn how to think about your situation differently and more optimistically.  Worry on its own never did anybody any good.  You know that right?  I read so many books during my recovery about how the brain heals and what's good for it etc.  Exercise has amazing benefits.  I've come to believe that actual positive thoughts help with healing. 

 

Please congratulate yourself for rescuing yourself in the first place and now resolve to only look forward, not back!  You will get better and better!

perhaps its helping if I tell you this..

 

I knew an old lady who was given benzos because doctors thought she was demented and too angry about all this..

She felt worse and worse and her daughter decided to stop all the pills. After half a year the woman was herself again. She is now living alone again, at 76, and is not suffering from Dementia any more.

I know many old people who stopped taking drugs and got their brain back so I would not worry. I would keep on living a healthy live and train my brain..

 

If I were healed that's the last thing I would be thinking about. Your health is a gift. Every second you spend worrying about something like this that is beyond your control is another second that could have been spent living a happy and pain free life.

no matter what you do, if you live long enough you're going to have horrible health problems and eventually die, probably in pain. can't change that so not much point in stressing about it!

Wow xerxes...such an uplifting and comforting post.....NOT 

no matter what you do, if you live long enough you're going to have horrible health problems and eventually die, probably in pain. can't change that so not much point in stressing about it!

 

This is not everyone's story!  Not everyone goes down with horrible health problems and dies in pain.  I'm sorry if that's the experience you've had with your loved ones, but people needn't accept this grim prediction for themselves.

Sick Ness:  congratulations on being free of all the meds you were on!  What an accomplishment!  I really believe that by taking good care of ourselves through nutrition, exercise, rest and balancing everything the best we can, we can stay healthier and in good shape for longer.  I became seriously ill before being put on Benzos and was in very bad shape.  Many different things helped me recover but one book, Never Be Sick Again by Raymond Francis, was my rock.  He had a life threatening medical illness but, was able to recover and even become healthier eventually.  I am amazed by how the body wants balance, to be well and often, is able to bounce back from many, many problems.  It's a very interesting book. 

Sick Ness- I took xanax continuosly for thirty years and jumped May 31st...I am 60 years old so took it from age 30 to age 60...my friends and family say I am the sharpest person they know- I have a great memory for details and names...I still remember peoples' phone numbers years later...so I do not believe I have been permanently brain damaged by the xanax...I am still struggling to heal post taper but I can feel signs of healing slowly but surely. Fear is not the answer- we just need to look forward to the rest of our life benzo free!

The studies that show a connection between benzo use and dementia are correlational studies and not causation studies. What that means is that they have found a somewhat higher prior benzo use in subjects with later dementia. There is absolutely no PROOF that benzo use leads to dementia. Lets think about this--there are many reasons why people who use benzos at one time or another might later have dementia, not necessarily just the benzo use causing dementia. Correlation is NOT necessarily causation.

 

For instance:

They may have more stressful lives for one reason or another, thus the benzo use, and also later dementia.

They may not take as good a care of their bodies for one reason or another, leading to benzo use, then later dementia.

They may have doctors that prescribe all kinds of drugs willy nilly, including statins and others, that can lead to dementia.

They may have brains that are in some way less robust than the general population, already predisposed to dementia.

 

What is bothersome to me is that during times of heavy flurazepam use, I did have more memory issues of the type seen in dementia. But I have a lot of faith in the power of the human body to heal, and my memory is much better now. All we can do is take care of ourselves from this point out and enjoy the life we have.

 

Yes, there is a lot you can do to avoid dementia, including eating a great (paleoish, organic, low carb, real food) diet. Avoiding all the other drugs doctors try to push onto people including statins, blood pressure meds, and other drugs for diseases that can be treated with lifestyle choices. Get some exercise everyday and keep your mind active through socializing, developing new interests, reading stuff that exercises your mind, keeping up on the latest news in the world. Make yourself indispensable at any age through continued work or volunteer work.

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

Mark Twain

 

I don't see how benzos cause alzheimer, unless it's caused by the neurotoxicity/oxidative stress? Eaither way, you can always prevent dementia with good habits.

Three articles that may provide useful info:

 

http://www.bmj.com/company/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Benzodiazepine.pdf

 

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/305922.php

 

http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i90

 

 

Three articles that may provide useful info:

 

http://www.bmj.com/company/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Benzodiazepine.pdf

 

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/305922.php

 

http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i90

 

There are some problems with this study:

 

- This study's authors received funding from Pfizer and Merck. That should raise a few flags.

 

- This study was designed ONLY to determine whether "cumulative use" over a 10 year period correlates with a higher instance of dementia. Of course it doesn't. It's not about how much you've taken sporadically, but about how long you've taken it continuously. The study's "high exposure levels" meant taking 2 mg of ativan 121 times (or more) during a rolling 10 year window. That is NOTHING. Within the highest benzodiazepine use category (the participation percentage of which we are not given), the median level of use was equivalent to slightly over a year's worth of daily use. That's within a 10 year period, mind you. Only 3% of participants had filled a prescription within the last 6 months.

 

- The vast majority of those in the study were also highly educated (this population is less likely to display characteristics of dementia on the standardized dementia screening test they used).

 

There are other issues with it, but this is all my poor brain can handle right now. In effect, the only thing this study proves is that cumulative benzodiazepine use (i.e. filling 1 or more random prescriptions over 10 years) does not correlate with an increase in dementia. I did find this bit interesting though: "Participants with heavier benzodiazepine use were more likely to be women and report fair or poor self rated health, have more depressive symptoms, and have comorbidities (such as hypertension, stroke, and coronary heart disease) than non-users."

 

Again, more research needs to be done, but I don't think this particular study proves much of anything, at least not for daily, long-term benzo users.

Obviously, more study is needed. There's nothing conclusive yet, and I believe all of the studies that have  been conducted on this topic have said as much.

While nothing is conclusive yet (which is to be expected due to the complexity of studying such subjects), there are some trends that have been observed from multiple studies. Basically, almost all of the benzodiazepine / cognitive decline studies show that there are significantly more incidents of dementia among those who have used benzodiazepines than in those who have never used benzodiazepines, even if they disagree about which populations are more likely to have cognitive problems (current use, past use, cumulative dose, daily use, ever use, etc). Many studies do seem to show that long-term daily use (and especially past long-term daily use) are more likely to show an increased risk of dementia, although one study that looked at discontinued use in particular showed opposite findings (see below). Sporadic "ever use" and current use study results are more likely to be mixed. The different findings obtained by studies are likely due to methodological differences, especially regarding the definitions of exposure and cognitive outcome.

 

As I showed earlier, the newest study (the one that Lapis posted above: http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i90 ) used very low and non-daily doses for its exposure criteria, with a mere 3% of participants filling a prescription within the last 6 months. The study's authors were also funded by Pfizer and Merck, which raises a giant red flag for me. In looking through this research, it seems to have been designed specifically to "disprove" the latest studies which reveal an increased risk in dementia with benzodiazepine use (of course it does no such thing, but most people will just read the news brief headline, and not the actual studies it refers to). The authors of this study admit that "Few participants had heavy benzodiazepine use, and overall, our participants might have had lower levels of exposure than in some other studies." That's putting it mildly.

 

Here are some of the other studies (and their conclusions):

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=23045258 "Results of a complementary nested case-control study showed that ever use of benzodiazepines was associated with an approximately 50% increase in the risk of dementia (adjusted odds ratio 1.55, 1.24 to 1.95) compared with never users. The results were similar in past users (odds ratio 1.56, 1.23 to 1.98) and recent users (1.48, 0.83 to 2.63) but reached significance only for past users."

 

http://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S0924-977X(12)00139-3/abstract "Our results suggest that chronic benzodiazepine use is associated with poorer cognitive performance but not with accelerated cognitive decline with age."

 

http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g5205 "Benzodiazepine use is associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The stronger association observed for long term exposures reinforces the suspicion of a possible direct association, even if benzodiazepine use might also be an early marker of a condition associated with an increased risk of dementia. Unwarranted long term use of these drugs should be considered as a public health concern."

 

http://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(01)00453-X/abstract "After controlling for age, gender, education level, living alone, wine consumption, psychiatric history, and depressive symptomatology, ever use of benzodiazepines was associated with a significantly increased risk of dementia [adjusted odds ratio (OR), 1.7; 95% confidence interval, 1.2–2.4]. Former use was associated with a significantly increased risk of dementia (adjusted OR, 2.3; 95% CI,1.2–4.5). No association was found between dementia and the current use of benzodiazepines (adjusted OR, 1.0; 95% CI, 0.6–1.6). Our finding suggest that former use of benzodiazepines could be a risk factor for dementia, but more detailed investigation are needed."

 

http://jech.bmj.com/content/66/10/869 "Of 1134 men with complete data, 103 (9.1%) had been taking benzodiazepines regularly at one or more phases. These men showed a marked increased incidence of dementia (OR=3.50, 95% CI 1.57 to 7.79, p=0.002), which persisted despite adjustment for psychological distress and other covariates. Men exposed in earlier phases showed a greater association than more recent exposure, counter to what one would expect if this was due to reverse causation, though we failed to demonstrate a dose–response effect with drug duration."

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=20808131 This study looked at whether benzodiazepine discontinuation would decrease the risk of dementia. The results were that the risk of dementia was high for current users and decreased as the duration of BZD discontinuation lengthened.

 

Of course more studies need to be done, but the research trends are already quite revealing: benzos are bad news for the brain. I'm fairly certain most of us are already aware of that. As I've personally experienced all of the symptoms of middle-stage Alzheimer's (and a few horrifying symptoms of late-stage Alzheimer's) during withdrawal and recovery (starting at the ripe old age of 33), I don't need to wait for "proof." Even so, I strongly believe that we can heal from this, and strengthen our resilience against further brain issues down the line. Thank god for neuroplasticity!

 

If I were healed that's the last thing I would be thinking about. Your health is a gift. Every second you spend worrying about something like this that is beyond your control is another second that could have been spent living a happy and pain free life.

 

And basically, yeah, this.

If I were healed that's the last thing I would be thinking about. Your health is a gift. Every second you spend worrying about something like this that is beyond your control is another second that could have been spent living a happy and pain free life.

 

And basically, yeah, this.

 

I agree wholeheartedly!

 

I think I'm actually smarter, not a joke, but my ability to concentrate is much stronger after this life changing experience.  Additionally, my memory is much better than my husband who was never on benzos and doesn't take hardly any medications at all.

 

pianogirl

I really haven't had any cognitive issues at all. My issues have been mostly physical. And I agree about not spending a lot of time worry about this issue. As long we get ourselves off the medication in a safe way, then we're helping our bodies to get healthy. It's really all we can do right now.

....Im recovered after ten years of Benzo use, and 13 years of pharamceutical medication with very few breaks in between. All I can do is wonder if it's too late or if I'll get Allzheimers or Dementia when I'm older.

Is anyone else worried about this? Is there a way to counteract dementia??

 

Does anyone have any good information on any of this?

 

I am living proof that the brain does heal. It's been two years since my withdrawal, and I still feel better and better each day. I wonder to what extent it heals though?

 

I have heard that before age 40, the brain has a better chance of healing up, and I stopped at 27. 

 

I do still have an anxiety problem. There was a reason I was on benzos to begin with. I am so worried about my future.

 

I feel fine now, but will it some uknown consequences rear their heads at me when I age??

 

Has anyone out there been on long term Benzos and is now much older and still doing okay??

 

I am scared and angry at doctors for allowing these medicines in my life and the lives of others.

Are you still not fully recovered? 100%?