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The interesting thing about dementia is that it is not normally distributed whatsoever. Pick basically any characteristic imaginable - environmental, behavioral, or genetic, and you're going to find a difference, often very significant, between groups.

Everything from your occupation, to your diet, to martial status, to hobbies, and much more have been shown to have significant relationships with dementia rates. The problem you obviously run into here is that a person's approach towards healthcare is itself a major behavioral characteristic and so seeing varying rates of dementia based on this characteristic alone would be very unsurprising.



> seeing varying rates of dementia based on this characteristic alone would be very unsurprising

Sure. That's why the antibody cross-reactivity is intriguing.


You're begging the question. While endless things are associated with dementia (or its absence) nobody knows what causes it, and so looking for causal reasons with behavioral characteristics is going to mislead without carefully controlled experimental (and not observational) studies.




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