High blood pressure tied to dementia: researchers

High blood pressure tied to dementia: researchers
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Elderly people with high bloodpressure may be more likely to develop thinking and learningproblems that can lead to dementia, researchers said on Monday.
Hypertension was linked to one of two types of mildcognitive impairment, a condition that can foreshadow thedevelopment of dementia, but not the type strongly associatedwith Alzheimer's disease, according to the study published inthe journal Archives of Neurology.
People with mild cognitive impairment can have difficultieswith language, memory, attention span or other mental functionssignificant enough to be noticeable to other people and to bedetected in tests. One type significantly affects memory, andthe other does not.
The impairment is not enough to interfere with daily lifeand the person does not show other symptoms of dementia.
The elderly people with high blood pressure in this studyoften had a form of mild cognitive impairment that can be aprecursor to vascular dementia, the second most common form ofdementia after Alzheimer's disease. It is often associated withstroke. High blood pressure raises the risk for stroke.
"It looks like hypertension leads to a cognitive impairmentwhich is actually not really memory impairment but impairmentin other cognitive domains," in particular, language and theability to perform familiar tasks, Dr. Christiane Reitz ofColumbia University Medical Center in New York, one of theresearchers, said in a telephone interview.
The researchers tracked 918 people in New York, average age76, who did not have mild cognitive impairment when theyentered the study from 1992 through 1994.
EXAMS AND TESTS
They were given physical exams and cognitive tests whenthey entered the study, and then were reexamined about every 18months. They were followed for an average of 4-1/2 years,during which 334 of them developed mild cognitive impairment.
Those with high blood pressure had a 40 percent increasedrisk of developing mild cognitive impairment, and, moresignificantly, a 70 percent higher risk for the "non-amnestic"form that does not involve broader memory difficulties.
"These findings suggest that prevention and treatment ofhypertension may have an important impact in lowering the riskof cognitive impairment," the researchers wrote.
Previous research has been inconclusive about a linkbetween high blood pressure and either mild cognitiveimpairment or dementia, they added.
Another study focusing on the health consequences of highblood pressure appeared in the journal Archives of InternalMedicine. Those researchers tracked a nationally representativesample of 4,646 U.S. adults.
About three-fourths of those who had conditions such ascoronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes or others that raisethe risk for cardiovascular complications also had high bloodpressure, the study found.
(Editing by Maggie Fox and Vicki Allen)