New research has found that one of the best ways to keep from getting dementia is to control your blood pressure.
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.