Vision Impairment in Dementia—A Growing Priority for Prevention

With an unweighted population attributable fraction of 22.2%, hearing loss was ranked at the top of the 12 modifiable risk factors for the global burden of dementia in the 2020 report of the Lancet Dementia Commission.1 Vision impairment, another sensory stimulus, was not among the leading modifiable factors of dementia. However, an increasing number of studies in the last few years have investigated the association between vision impairment and the risk of dementia, with most finding positive associations.2,3 This highlights the importance of vision impairment as a potentially modifiable factor for dementia, especially considering that 80.0% of vision impairment cases are preventable or treatable.