High Blood Pressure Linked to Dementia
Before we scare you, keep in mind that if everyone in America who experienced high blood pressure -- that's about a third of us -- got dementia, you would know about it However, new research suggests that the relationship between hypertension and dementia is more pronounced and alarming than doctors previously understood (continued).
Before we scare you, keep in mind that if everyone in America who experienced high blood pressure — that’s about a third of us — got dementia, you would know about it. However, new research suggests that the relationship between hypertension and dementia is more pronounced and alarming than doctors previously understood and the National Institutes of Health is looking into so-called white matter damage in the brain.
Scientists already knew that high blood pressure impaired the ability of brain cells to communicate, but new data shows that people may suffer from multiple forms of dementia simultaneously. The good news is that high blood pressure can be easier to control than other contributing causes of dementia. It should also be noted that we’re talking about research, here, and not every study agrees. The NIH is planning some major research of its own into the subject. — PZS
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In a flurry of new research, scientists scanned people’s brains to show hypertension fuels a kind of scarring linked to later development of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Those scars can start building up in middle age, decades before memory problems will appear.
The evidence is strong enough that the National Institutes of Health soon will begin enrolling thousands of hypertension sufferers in a major study to see if aggressive treatment — pushing blood pressure lower than currently recommended — better protects not just their hearts but their brains.
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Some 67 million Americans -- about a third of the adult population -- have high blood pressure, and about half of them do not have it under control, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Elevated blood pressure is a major factor in heart disease and strokes.
This could be a particularly rich example of how scientific study results can be read in seemingly contradictory ways, as what we have here is research that purports to find a possible link between consuming chocolate and staying thin.
The good news for chocolate aficionados is that a new study out of Germany, featuring a generous sample size of more than 19,000 people, suggests that there may be a link between chocolate consumption and lower blood pressure (continued) .
While heart disease remains the No. 1 killer of people in the U.S., researchers have found that we can help explain a large part of these cases through one's genetic makeup. In fact, one in five white people are believed to have the "blood pressure gene," where the genetic variance that controls salt in the kidneys changes to affect individuals' blood pressure.
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