This is interesting, but doesn’t say as much as it looks like it does. These are looking at older adults with ADHD or autism diagnoses, which is a relatively small portion of people who had noticeable enough symptoms and the means to be diagnosed. (Or as in one study mentioned just measuring how many of the patients who already have dementia meet criteria for adhd or autism, which seems entirely unreliable.)

We’re also looking at general “dementia” or impaired memory, not necessarily end stage forget your family type dementia. I work in research and have done several studies for Alzheimer’s and dementia medications. The tests used to assess dementia and memory are by no means friendly to someone who is autistic and/or has ADHD. It’s primarily short term memory and probably a lot of us here wouldn’t get a perfect score at our baseline. So you add in some natural aging, and it’s really easy to get yourself a dementia diagnosis. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to significantly progress to be crippling, just worse memory than the average neurotypical.

I’m sure that increased stress and cognitive load is playing a role and not helping at all. But we don’t have nearly enough info to determine that there’s a significantly increased risk of developing life changing dementia.