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Increased risk of dementia in patients with genital warts: A nationwide cohort study in Taiwan
Author(s) -
Lin ChiaHua,
Chien WuChien,
Chung ChiHsiang,
Chiang ChienPing,
Wang WeiMing,
Chang HsinAn,
Kao YuChen,
Tzeng NianSheng
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
the journal of dermatology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.9
H-Index - 65
eISSN - 1346-8138
pISSN - 0385-2407
DOI - 10.1111/1346-8138.15277
Subject(s) - genital warts , dementia , medicine , hazard ratio , cohort , sex organ , cohort study , population , disease , confidence interval , cervical cancer , environmental health , cancer , biology , genetics
Genital warts are a common sexually transmitted disease caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) infections. The prevalence of dementia is 4–8% in those aged 65 years or older in Taiwanese community studies, with a high social and economic burden for patients, family caregivers, the community and society. Previous studies have shown that viral infections such as herpes simplex and herpes zoster were associated with dementia. This study aimed to investigate the association between dementia and HPV infections. A population‐based cohort study using data from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database was conducted. Fine and Grays’s survival analysis was employed to estimate the hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the association between genital warts and dementia. From all of the potential participants aged 50 years or more, a total of 16 116 patients were enrolled, including 4029 genital warts‐infected patients, with 12 087 sex‐, age‐ and indexed date‐matched controls (1:3). The cumulative incidences of dementia were 10.72 per 10 3 person‐years and 6.43 per 10 3 person‐years in the genital warts and control group, respectively. There were 475 dementia cases from the genital warts cohort during the follow‐up period of 15 years. The adjusted HR for dementia was 1.485 (95% CI, 1.321–1.668; P < 0.001) for genital warts patients after adjusting for all of the covariates. Our study indicates that genital warts infection may increase the risk of dementia.