Tamsulosin Causes Dementia?

Yesterday, I saw my urologist for my annual checkup with him.  PSA looked great.

We also reviewed my meds.  I've been taking Tamsulosin for BPH for a decade or more, but he said that Tamsulosin is now being correlated with dementia.  He said a team had come from Chicago (or somewhere) to explain this new finding.

I was a bit alarmed, because I am very dependent on Tamsulosin to get through the night.  Life has been hard enough when I forget to refill the prescription.  What if I need to give it up altogether?  So I went home and looked up the research.  I found this.  Not good news.

The doctor has been bugging me to do surgery (again) to fix the problem and get off the drugs.  It means kicking the can down the road, because this surgery is only good for 5-10 years, at least for me.  Last time I had a catheter in for two weeks, and I kind of hated carrying a bag around wherever I went.  (I had clever ways of hiding it.)  And it was pretty painful. 

So this leaves me wondering if Tamsulosin has played a role in my Alzheimer's disease.  No cause/effect relationship has been established for the correlation, and no reason for the correlation has been identified.  It's not even clear if this has anything to do with Alzheimer's disease.  There's no indication of what kind of dementia is being correlated.

There is one thought that the drug is not affecting the progress of the disease, just that it's "unmasking" the effects.  This would be the opposite of what Donepezil (Aricept) and similar drugs do.  Donepezil does nothing to slow the progress of the underlying disease--the disease will still kill you at the same time--but it will hide to some extent the cognitive decline.  So maybe the Tamsulosin is exaggerating the cognitive decline in people who already had undiagnosed Alzheimer's disease?  No one knows, at least not yet.