Anesthesia and incident dementia: a population-based, nested, case-control study.

Objective: To test the hypothesis that exposure to procedures requiring general anesthesia during adulthood is not significantly associated with incident dementia using a retrospective, population-based, nested, case-control study design.

Participants And Methods: Using the Rochester Epidemiology Project and the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer's Disease Patient Registry, residents of Olmsted County, Minnesota, diagnosed as having dementia between January 1, 1985, and December 31, 1994, were identified. For each incident case, a sex- and age-matched control was randomly selected from the general pool of Olmsted County residents who were dementia free in the index year of dementia diagnosis.