Investigating stroke-related vision impairments and time to incident dementia diagnosis

Vision loss is a risk factor for dementia, but it is unknown whether stroke-related vision impairment is linked to dementia risk in stroke survivors. This secondary analysis aimed to quantify the association between stroke-related vision impairment and time to incident dementia diagnosis, from time of stroke, using the Arthrosclerosis Risk in Communities study dataset. We included participants who sustained a non-fatal probable or definite ischemic, incident stroke captured from hospital surveillance during the study period and excluded those who were diagnosed with incident dementia prior to or less than half a year after the incident stroke. The association between stroke-related vision impairment (binary) and time from incident stroke to dementia diagnosis was analyzed using a Fine-Gray survival model to account for the competing risk of death, adjusting for age at incident stroke, stroke severity, biological sex, education and race-center. Among 787 stroke survivors, 31 % were diagnosed with dementia during the follow-up period and 19.5 % had stroke-related vision impairment. The presence of stroke-related vision impairment was not significantly associated with dementia diagnosis (HR = 1.18; 95 % CI 0.85, 1.63; p = 0.32). While results suggest that stroke-related vision impairment corresponds to a higher cumulative incidence of dementia, the association was not statistically significant.