Association Between Cumulative Anticholinergic Use and White Matter Hyperintensity Burden
Kevin H Li, Chloe Krakauer, Jennifer C Nelson, Paul K Crane, Jalal B Andre, Patti Curl, Esther C Yuh, James Ralston, Shelly L Gray, Christine MacDonald · 2025
Read Association Between Cumulative Anticholinergic Use and White Matter Hyperintensity Burden by Kevin H Li, Chloe Krakauer, Jennifer C Nelson, Paul K Crane, Jalal B Andre, Patti Curl, Esther C Yuh, James Ralston, Shelly L Gray, Christine MacDonald (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-11714981.txt.
Description
Li and a large team (2025) asked whether heavy lifetime use of anticholinergic drugs tracks with more white matter damage in the aging brain. These common drugs are already linked to dementia risk, but a pathway through white matter hyperintensities, bright spots on scans, was unclear. The team used a long-running Seattle-area cohort of adults over 65, totaling each person's standardized drug dose over the ten years before their first clinical MRI scan.
Of 1,043 people, 17 percent sat in the highest exposure band. That group showed clearly worse scores on all three white matter rating scales than non-users. Oddly, the lightest users also scored slightly worse than non-users, so no clean dose-response appeared. Antidepressants supplied most of the total dose, and antihistamines were the most widely used class. The authors conclude the heaviest burden goes with more white matter damage, while the missing gradient needs mechanistic study.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Kevin H Li, Chloe Krakauer, Jennifer C Nelson, Paul K Crane, Jalal B Andre, Patti Curl, Esther C Yuh, James Ralston, Shelly L Gray, Christine MacDonald |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 2 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |