Hypertension Can Be Linked To Dementia

Hypertension Can Be Linked To Dementia




Hypertension is also known as high blood pressure. Hypertension can lead to severe complications including increased risk of heart disease, stroke, and death. The force exerted by the blood against the walls of the blood vessels is called blood pressure. Hypertension is a chronic condition that can cause progressive organ damage. It is now well known that majority of cases of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia is not due to the genetic predisposition but it is due to chronic exposure to vascular risk factors.

Dementia patients usually receive clinical treatment only after symptoms are clearly evident. However it has been observed that when signs of brain damage are manifested, it may be too late to reverse the neurodegenerative process. Also Physicians are still lacking in the procedures for assessing progression markers that could reveal pre-symptomatic alterations and could identify patients at risk of developing dementia.

Researchers conducted many experiments and research for identifying the patients who are at the risk of developing dementia. One of their researches took people aged between 41 to 65 years who compliant to give written consent with the possibility to perform a dedicated 3 Tesla MRI scan.
This research was done on patients who had no sign of structural damage and no diagnosis of dementia. To determine their hypertensive status and the related target organ damage all the patients underwent clinical examination. Also MRI scan of all the patients were done to identify micro structural damage.

A specific group of tests was administered to gain insights in the neurocognitive profile of patients. The primary aim of the researchers were to find any specific signature of brain changes in white matter micro structure of hypertensive patients, associated with an impairment of the related cognitive functions.

The result of this research showed that hypertensive patients showed significant alterations in three specific white matter fiber-tracts. It was also seen that hypertensive patients scored significantly worse in the cognitive domains ascribable to brain regions connected through those fiber-tracts. As a result of this hypertensive patients showed decreased performances in executive functions, processing speed, memory and related learning tasks.

It was concluded that the white matter fiber-tracking on MRIs showed an early signature of damage in hypertensive patients which was otherwise undetectable by conventional neuroimaging. Now since these changes could be detected before patients show symptoms, so these patients can be given medication earlier so that further deterioration in brain function can be prevented further.

A new finding suggests that at age of 50 years, the risk of dementia may be increased in people who have raised levels of systolic blood pressure. Although some previous studies have also linked raised blood pressure in midlife to an increased risk of dementia in later life.

People with no heart or blood vessel-related conditions also showed link between high blood pressure and dementia. They had an increased risk of 49% compared to people with systolic blood pressure lower than 130 mm.

Researcher’s analysis suggested that the importance of mid-life hypertension on brain health is due to the duration of exposure. So people with raised blood pressure at the age of 50 are at increased risk while people at 60 and 70 are not as people with hypertension at 50 are likely to be more exposed to risk longer.

The link between raised blood pressure and dementia may be due to the fact that high blood pressure is linked to silent or mini strokes, restricted blood supply to the brain and damage to the white matter in the brain, which contains many of the brain's nerve fibres. This damage may be the cause of the resulting decline in the brain's processes.

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