Nearly 13 percent of people with dementia actually have something else.

More than 10 million people worldwide are diagnosed with dementia each year. But a new study shows that up to 13% of them may have been misdiagnosed and instead have a treatable condition.

It turns out they actually have liver disease. “Healthcare providers need to be aware of this potential overlap between dementia and hepatic encephalopathy, which is treatable,” said Jasmohan Bajaj, of Harvard University. Virginia Commonwealth University.

Hepatic encephalopathy, a cognitive disorder caused by liver failure, affects more than 40 percent of patients with cirrhosis. Memory problems caused by dementia are difficult to distinguish.

Alcohol is no longer the only cause of liver failure. More and more people with high cholesterol, obesity and diabetes are also suffering from it. If you catch it in time, a complete recovery is quite possible.

The researchers found at least two patients who had been diagnosed with dementia but actually had liver problems. They were cured. “He’s a different person,” said the wife of one patient, after the memory loss, falls, tremors and hallucinations disappeared.

Reversible damage

A recent study in mice suggests that even the effects of liver aging may be reversible if detected early enough. “We have shown that aging worsens non-alcoholic liver disease, but by reducing this effect we can reverse the damage,” explains Anna May, a hepatologist at the center. Duke Universityout. “You’re never too old to get better.”

Earlier this year, Bajaj and colleagues examined the medical records of 177,422 U.S. veterans who were diagnosed with dementia between 2009 and 2019. None of them had been diagnosed with liver disease, but the team found that more than 10% had high fibrosis scores of 4 (FIB-4), a measure of liver damage, meaning they were likely to have cirrhosis.

In their new study, the researchers repeated their analysis with 68,807 medical records of patients from a national database who were not veterans, to see if their previous results reflected the general U.S. population. To their surprise, more patients had high FIB-4 scores, about 13 percent.

“This important association between dementia and liver health highlights the importance of screening patients for treatable conditions that cause cognitive decline,” Bajaj concludes.