Adults whose earliest months of life fell under British wartime sugar rationing developed dementia at meaningfully lower rates decades later, according to two separate analyses of the same historical accident.
The larger of the two, the Neurology analysis of UK Biobank participants, examined 64,737 people born around the September 1953 end of rationing. Those exposed in the womb plus their first year showed hazard ratios of 0.79 and 0.77, respectively, for all-cause dementia and Alzheimer's disease compared with unexposed peers.
