During the study, scientists scanned the brains of people to reveal that hypertension causes some kind of scarring that is related to the development of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. The scars can begin to form in middle age, years before memory problems are apparent.

The new evidence is so strong that the National Institutes of Health is planning on studying thousands of people with hypertension to see if vigorous treatment will help protect their hearts and their brains. This aggressive treatment will involve getting blood pressure lower than normal recommendations.

The largest factor for Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia is age. Dementia affects about one in eight people who are 65 and older.

For a long time now, scientists knew that many of the triggers for heart disease such as obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes appear to increase the chances for getting dementia. This said, they thought that the link was with “vascular dementia”, which are memory problems related to small strokes; not the frightening Alzheimer’s disease. Now, specialists are finding that many patients have a mixture of both types of dementia.

Having hypertension, which is a blood pressure reading of 140 over 90 or higher, weakens arteries and  also seems to spur Alzheimer’s disease-like activity. One culprit could be the scarring known as white matter lesions. White matter works like the brain’s telephone network with a system of  nerve fibers that permit the brain cells to communicate with each other. Unfortunately even small increases in blood pressure can cause harm to the tiny blood vessels that sustain the white matter. This damage causes interruptions to those signals.

The new studies found that MRI scans revealed that women 65 and older with hypertension had notably more white matter lesions in their brains eight years later. The journal Stroke just published comparable evidence from a John Hopkins University-led study that observed 983 people for more than 15 years, beginning in middle age. The results showed that the more time people spent with uncontrolled high blood pressure, the more white matter harm they incurred.

All this said, hypertension by itself doesn’t mean one is condemned to get dementia. There are far more people with hypertension than dementia; about one in three adults in the U.S.

We all know that any aerobic exercise is good for your heart and research has revealed that it can delay the hardening of arteries that often occurs during the aging process. New discoveries now indicate that flexibility may also have a positive effect on keeping the arteries healthy.

Your risk for getting heart disease and stroke may be able to be predicted from a basic flexibility test. The American Physiological Society has published a new study giving evidence to the fact that with women and men over the age of 40, the capability to touch one’s toes can reveal the hardness of the arteries.

Hardening of the arteries may increase blood pressure and is a huge factor in the cause of heart disease. Past research has shown us that aerobic exercise can assist in slowing the process of stiffening arteries as we age. Now researchers are discovering that staying flexible is definitely beneficial to the arteries.

The majority of Americans take in more than twice the daily recommended level of sodium, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is impossible to get rid of all salt in the American diet, but if efforts for decreasing salt are victorious, advocates say there would be less hypertension, heart disease and strokes. Heart disease and strokes are the No. 1 and No. 3 killers across the nation.

Many dietary elements affect blood pressure, but salt is the most dominant, says Lawrence J. Appel, who is a professor of medicine, epidemiology and international health at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. He is also a member of the salt panel at the Institute of Medicine, which is a scientific advisory panel. Appel said salt is the reason we have a blood pressure epidemic.  He adds, “No one knows how much salt he consumes or has easy control of it; it’s why the solution is a public health one.”

He said one thing we can do is to not shake salt on our food. The problem though, is that most salt is added during processing or in preparation at restaurants. To change, restaurants would have to throw out recipes they have counted on for years, and then there’s the concern for consumer dissatisfaction with the changes.

A consumer group, The Center for Science in the Public Interest, that sued in 2005 to eliminate salt from the Food and Drug Administration’s safe food list, says restaurants and process foods are responsible for more than three-fourths of the salt that people eat.

Michael F. Jacobson, the Center Executive Director, said that regulation is a must, because, unlike fattening foods, the results of consuming too much salt are not as obvious.

Action is being taken by the Grocery Manufacturing Association for decreasing salt in our foods. It will be a slow process because Americans are so used to the taste of salt. Salt is also used in production and preservation.

The good news is that lower-sodium options are increasing, slowly but surely.

This innovative “polypill” was found to be as beneficial as all of the elements taken separately, with no increase in side effects. According to the study, a person’s risk for heart disease and stroke can be reduced by half, by consistently taking it.

The Polycap, an exploratory combo by Cadila Pharmaceuticals of Ahmedabad, India, was tested in the study. It has small doses of three blood pressure medicines (atenolol, ramipril and the “water pill” thiazide). It also has the generic version of the cholesterol-lowering statin drug Zocor and a 100 milligram baby aspirin.

In the study, there were about 2,000 people at 50 centers in India. The average age was 54 and they each person at least one risk factor for heart disease, such as high blood pressure, obesity, high cholesterol, diabetes or smoking. Four hundred were given the polypill. The rest were put in eight groups of 200. They were given separate components of the pill. The treatment took place over 12 weeks.

The polypill reduced systolic blood pressure (the number on top) by more than seven units and diastolic (the bottom number) was reduced by almost six, when compared with groups who received no blood pressure medications.

Bad cholesterol or LDL, decreased by 23 percent on the polypill against 28 percent in those taking the statin drug separately. Triglycerides came down by 10 percent on the combo pill versus 20 percent with the individual statin use. Good cholesterol, or HDL, was not affected by either pill. Anti-clotting effects were the same as with aspirin by itself and side effect rates were also the same for the polypill as they were for the five separate medicines.

The maker of Polycap sponsored the study. There is currently not an available price for the polypill, but generic ingredients cost around $17 a month.

A larger study is still needed to find out whether the polypill does reduce heart attacks and strokes. Also, the Food and Drug Administration will need to approve the polypill.

Leah Devlin, the State Health Director, told the House Health Committee on February 26 that smoking is extensively banned from offices, which protects the health of white-collar workers from secondhand smoke. It has been proven that secondhand smoke raises the risk for heart disease and cancer. The big effect of the bill will be on blue-collar and restaurant workers who are currently lacking the ability to force smokers to go outside to smoke.

In 2005 and 2007 a less influential form of the legislation was unsuccessful in getting passed. This month in Virginia, which is pretty tobacco-friendly, a limited ban on smoking in restaurants and bars was passed. Currently, the bill has been passed from the N.C. House Health Committee to the House Legal Issues Committee, so the bill is still in progression.

Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, says that the most surprising finding is that they found significant metabolic advantages in the lack of calorie reduction or weight loss.

In the study, which appeared Monday, December 8, 2008 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the people who were asked to eat about three whole walnuts, seven or eight whole hazelnuts and seven or eight whole almonds showed the most improvement in their health. Although they didn’t lose weight overall, most were successful in reducing belly fat as well as their cholesterol and blood pressure.

Dr. Manson does caution that adding nuts to a typical Western diet that has too much junk food and calories, could cause weight gain and increase health risks. She adds that using nuts instead of snacks such as chips or crackers is a smart change in one’s diet.

According to the Heart Association, 50 million Americans have metabolic syndrome, which is a combination of health risks like obesity and high blood pressure.  Following a diet that is easy and satisfying could mean major health improvements for many Americans. People feel full when eating nuts and they also increase the body’s ability to burn fat, according to Dr. Jordi Salas-Salvado, the lead author of the University of Rovira i Virgili in Reus, Spain. Sals-Salvado said in an email that “nuts could have an effect on metabolic syndrome by multiple mechanisms.” Nuts have many anti-inflammatory substances such as fiber and antioxidants such as vitamin E. Also, they are high in unsaturated fat, which is a healthier fat which can lower blood  triglycerides and increase good cholesterol.

In the study, more than 1,200 Spainards, ranging from age 55 to 80, were randomly assigned one of three diets for a year. Although some of the participants had risk factors such as Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and abdominal obesity, none had no previous history of heart disease.

In the beginning, 751 people had metabolic syndrome, which is about 61 percent. These people were distributed evenly among the three study groups.

Basic advice about reducing all fat in their diets was given to the low-fat group. The second group ate a Mediterranean diet that was rich in nuts. The third group ate a Mediterranean diet and had to consume more than four tablespoons of olive oil a day.

A year later, all three groups had less people with metabolic syndrome, but the group that ate more nuts had the most improvement, with 52 percent having heart risk factors as compared with the previous 61 percent. The olive oil group had 57 percent with the syndrome after the study, and astonishingly, there was no significant difference in the syndrome of the low-fat group after a year.

The Spanish Ministry of Health and the government of Valencia, Spain founded the study. The publication disclosed that lead author Salas-Salvado and another co-author are unpaid advisers to nut industry groups. Salvado said that all their research “has been conducted under standard ethical and scientific rules” and that peer-review journal editors determined the study findings were not influenced by ties with any industry.