A new French Study has discovered a link between Diabetes and Alzheimer’s where people with Diabetes and Alzheimer’s were found to have less memory loss than people with exclusively Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers at INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research in Toulouse, followed 608 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease for four years, testing their memory and thinking skills twice a year.

There were 63 participants with diabetes that started with the same average score of 20 on the test of thinking ability. There was an average overall decline of 1.24 points on that test every six months. But the decline in the thinking ability scores was 0.38 points greater every six months for those without diabetes.

Dr. Robert Friedland, chair of neurology at the University of Louisville said the differences seen in the study “are very minimally significant, less than a point on a 30-point scale,” “The difference in many of the mental state examination scores was very small. It was statistically significant, but clinically meaningless.” He mentioned several reasons why this effect may have been.

The medications taken for diabetes to help control blood sugar level could have a beneficial effect on the brain, patients with diabetes have more vascular disease in the heart as well as the retina, and some of their impairment might be due to that, so it was progressing more slowly,”

“It’s not clear from this study and others what the relationship is,” said William Thies, chief medical and scientific officer of the Alzheimer’s Association.

What is clear, Thies said, is that having diabetes increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease — a relationship acknowledged in the first sentence of a report on the French study in the Oct. 27 issue of Neurology.

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