Researchers examined cognitive test results and brain scans for 1,991 patients visiting a memory clinic at a Dutch hospital from 2009 to 2015. Overall, 380 patients, or about 19 percent, had calcification, or abnormal buildup of calcium, in the hippocampus, the region of the brain important for short-term and long-term memory.
Diabetics and smokers were about 50 percent more likely to have calcification in this region of the brain than other participants in the study, the researchers note in Radiology. The hippocampus is typically damaged in people who develop dementia and Alzheimer's disease. "The hippocampus is an important area in the brain for memory storage, so we thought that calcifications in this area would be related with cognitive problems," said lead study author Dr. Esther de Brouwer of the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands.
But in these volunteers, hippocampal calcifications were not related to cognitive problems, de Brouwer noted in an email. This was a surprise because researchers had expected that calcification might be related to vascular problems common with smoking and diabetes that could contribute to shrinkage of tissue, or atrophy, in the hippocampus and subsequent cognitive decline. Because the hippocampus has many layers, it's possible the calcification didn't damage the layers involved in memory, de Brouwer said. More research is needed to explore possible links between calcifications and cognitive problems, the study authors conclude.
The study wasn't designed to prove whether or how smoking or diabetes might directly contribute to calcifications in the hippocampus or cognitive problems.
Even though the study didn't connect calcifications to worse cognitive abilities, calcium may accumulate more when people have unhealthy blood vessels, said Dr. Rebecca Gottesman, a neurology researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who wasn't involved in the study.