Researchers at the Johns Hopkins and Yale university medical schools have found that a simple blood test to measure uric acid, a measure of kidney function, might reveal a risk factor for cognitive problems in old age.
Of 96 community-dwelling adults aged 60 to 92 years, those with uric-acid levels at the high end of the normal range had the lowest scores on tests of mental processing speed, verbal memory and working memory.
The findings appear in the January issue of Neuropsychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
High-normal uric acid levels, defined in this study as 5.8 to 7.6 mg/dL for men and 4.8 to 7.1 mg/dL for women, were more likely to be associated with cognitive problems even when the researchers controlled for age, sex, weight, race, education, diabetes, hypertension, smoking and alcohol abuse. These findings suggest that older people with serum (blood) uric-acid levels in the high end of the normal range are more likely to process information slowly and experience failures of verbal and working memory, as measured by the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and other well-established neuropsychological tests.
"It might be useful for primary-care physicians to ask elderly adults with high normal serum uric acid about any problems they might be having with their thinking, and perhaps refer those who express concern, or whose family members express concern, for neuropsychological screening," says lead author David Schretlen, PhD.
The link between high-normal uric acid and cognitive problems is also sufficiently intriguing for the authors to propose clinical studies of whether medicines that reduce uric acid, such as allopurinol, can help older people with high-normal uric acid avoid developing the mild cognitive deficits that often precede dementia.