Association Between the Tumor Marker Carcinoembryonic Antigen and the Risk of Dementia

There is an ongoing debate about how cancer and dementia relate to each other, and whether their relation is biologically determined or caused by surveillance and survival bias. We aimed to circumvent these biases by determining the relation between the tumor marker carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and the risk of dementia in 6,692 participants from the population-based Rotterdam Study. We found that higher levels of CEA were associated with a higher risk of dementia (HR per standard deviation increase in CEA = 1.11, 95% CI 1.04; 1.18). This finding may indicate that cancer and dementia are positively associated, but the mechanisms underlying the relation between CEA and dementia warrant further investigation.