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Scottish Sun
21-04-2025
- Health
- Scottish Sun
Lowering your blood pressure could slash your risk of dementia by 15% – the 14 lifestyle tweaks to make today
SLASHING high blood pressure could help protect against dementia, new research suggests. People with high blood pressure who took medication and accepted coaching to lower it reduced their risk of the brain disease by 15 per cent, scientists found. 1 Blood pressure medicines can help slash the risk of dementia Credit: Getty Nearly a million Brits have dementia and it is the leading cause of death. The new study, published in Nature Medicine, today, backs up what experts have long stressed: that dementia is not an inevitability of ageing. 'Antihypertensive treatment can prevent dementia in patients with uncontrolled hypertension," said Prof Jiang He, co-author of the study from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. "Given the high prevalence of uncontrolled hypertension worldwide, this effective intervention should be widely adopted and scaled up to reduce the global burden of dementia." Around one in three adults in the UK suffer from high blood pressure, also called hypertension. It can be caused by poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking, or stress, according to the NHS. Hypertension can raise the risk of dementia by damaging blood vessels in the brain, which reduces blood flow and can lead to strokes or brain damage. The new study builds on earlier findings, including research published in The Lancet last year that revealed that half of dementia cases could be prevented with 14 healthy habits. Reducing high blood pressure was one, along with lowering cholesterol and good education and mental stimulation. 'Looking after our heart and blood vessel health is something we can all do to improve our overall wellbeing and reduce our risk of dementia," Dr Julia Dudley, from Alzheimer's Research UK, said. Five simple tests that could indicate dementia "With no current treatments available on the NHS to slow or stop the diseases that cause dementia, there has never been a more pressing need to promote good brain health and to gain a deeper understanding of how we can reduce our risk of developing dementia." The trial, led by researchers in China and the US, involved nearly 34,000 people over 40 with uncontrolled high blood pressure across 326 rural Chinese villages. Half were given intensive blood pressure care - free or low-cost meds, lifestyle coaching – such as weight loss, alcohol reduction and reducing salt intake advice. They were also equipment and instructions to monitor blood pressure at home. The other half had usual clinical care - meaning participants' blood pressure was managed in their normal clinical settings. Lifestyle changes were recommended and some took blood pressure-lowering drugs. But this group did not receive free at-home blood pressure monitors, medications, or coaching. After four years, those on the intensive programme were 15 per cent less likely to develop dementia. They also had a 16 per cent lower risk of cognitive problems without full-blown dementia. Researchers said both groups were similar at the start, so the results are likely reliable. However, Prof Joanna Wardlaw, from the University of Edinburgh, said the study doesn't show whether it was the blood pressure meds or the lifestyle changes that made the difference - it's likely a mix of both. Other experts said longer studies are needed, and the approach should be tested in other countries too. "Further studies are needed to understand how other risk factors like genetics interact with factors like high blood pressure to influence dementia risk,' Dr Julia added. 'It will also be interesting to see whether the interventions trialled in this study can work in other populations across the world," she added. Prof Tara Spires-Jones, the director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, said the research 'provides further strong evidence supporting the importance of managing blood pressure and other cardiovascular risks to protect the brain during ageing'. She added: 'It is important to note that treating high blood pressure was not a foolproof guarantee as some people receiving treatment still developed dementia.'
The Sun
21-04-2025
- Health
- The Sun
Lowering your blood pressure could slash your risk of dementia by 15% – the 14 lifestyle tweaks to make today
SLASHING high blood pressure could help protect against dementia, new research suggests. People with high blood pressure who took medication and accepted coaching to lower it reduced their risk of the brain disease by 15 per cent, scientists found. 1 Nearly a million Brits have dementia and it is the leading cause of death. The new study, published in Nature Medicine, today, backs up what experts have long stressed: that dementia is not an inevitability of ageing. 'Antihypertensive treatment can prevent dementia in patients with uncontrolled hypertension," said Prof Jiang He, co-author of the study from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. "Given the high prevalence of uncontrolled hypertension worldwide, this effective intervention should be widely adopted and scaled up to reduce the global burden of dementia." Around one in three adults in the UK suffer from high blood pressure, also called hypertension. It can be caused by poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking, or stress, according to the NHS. Hypertension can raise the risk of dementia by damaging blood vessels in the brain, which reduces blood flow and can lead to strokes or brain damage. The new study builds on earlier findings, including research published in The Lancet last year that revealed that half of dementia cases could be prevented with 14 healthy habits. Reducing high blood pressure was one, along with lowering cholesterol and good education and mental stimulation. 'Looking after our heart and blood vessel health is something we can all do to improve our overall wellbeing and reduce our risk of dementia," Dr Julia Dudley, from Alzheimer's Research UK, said. Five simple tests that could indicate dementia "With no current treatments available on the NHS to slow or stop the diseases that cause dementia, there has never been a more pressing need to promote good brain health and to gain a deeper understanding of how we can reduce our risk of developing dementia." The trial, led by researchers in China and the US, involved nearly 34,000 people over 40 with uncontrolled high blood pressure across 326 rural Chinese villages. Half were given intensive blood pressure care - free or low-cost meds, lifestyle coaching – such as weight loss, alcohol reduction and reducing salt intake advice. They were also equipment and instructions to monitor blood pressure at home. The other half had usual clinical care - meaning participants' blood pressure was managed in their normal clinical settings. Lifestyle changes were recommended and some took blood pressure-lowering drugs. But this group did not receive free at-home blood pressure monitors, medications, or coaching. After four years, those on the intensive programme were 15 per cent less likely to develop dementia. They also had a 16 per cent lower risk of cognitive problems without full-blown dementia. Researchers said both groups were similar at the start, so the results are likely reliable. However, Prof Joanna Wardlaw, from the University of Edinburgh, said the study doesn't show whether it was the blood pressure meds or the lifestyle changes that made the difference - it's likely a mix of both. Other experts said longer studies are needed, and the approach should be tested in other countries too. "Further studies are needed to understand how other risk factors like genetics interact with factors like high blood pressure to influence dementia risk,' Dr Julia added. 'It will also be interesting to see whether the interventions trialled in this study can work in other populations across the world," she added. Prof Tara Spires-Jones, the director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, said the research 'provides further strong evidence supporting the importance of managing blood pressure and other cardiovascular risks to protect the brain during ageing'. She added: 'It is important to note that treating high blood pressure was not a foolproof guarantee as some people receiving treatment still developed dementia.'
Scientific American
21-04-2025
- Health
- Scientific American
To Reduce Dementia Risk, Treat High Blood Pressure
Treating high blood pressure for as little as four years can cut the risk of dementia by 15 percent, according to clinical a trial results published on Monday in Nature Medicine. In the investigation, intensive blood pressure reduction also lowered the risk of mild cognitive impairment, an early stage of memory loss in people who can still live independently, by 16 percent. Although research has long linked hypertension and dementia, the new study provides the strongest evidence yet that taking medications for the former actually reduces someone's risk of developing the latter. 'Our study shows that dementia is preventable,' says Jiang He, a physician who studies epidemiology, internal medicine and neurology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The researchers studied nearly 34,000 people with high blood pressure in rural Chinese villages. The team randomly assigned half of the villages to an intensive hypertension reduction program, and people in the other villages received their normal care. After four years, 4.6 percent of those who underwent intensive blood pressure control—the goal of which was to lower their blood pressure to less than 130/80 millimeters of mercury (mm HG)—were diagnosed with dementia compared with 5.4 percent in the group that received standard care. Because doctors treated people for only four years, it's not known if controlling blood pressure for a longer period of time would further reduce the dementia risk. Those results provide 'strong evidence' to support using antihypertensive medications to prevent dementia in people with high blood pressure, He said. Beth Abramson, who studies cardiac disease prevention and women's health at the University of Toronto, calls the results encouraging. Many people ignore their hypertension or fail to take medications as directed, even though the condition can cause heart attacks and strokes, says Abramson, who is co-chair of the American College of Cardiology Hypertension Workgroup and was not involved in the new study. In the U.S., 48 percent of adults have hypertension, defined as a blood pressure that is consistently at or above 130/80 mm HG. The hope of preventing dementia may motivate some people to take their blood pressure more seriously, says Mitchell S. V. Elkind, chief clinical science officer at the American Heart Association, who also wasn't involved in the new study. Surveys show dementia is one of the diseases that Americans fear most. According to the World Health Organization, 57 million people worldwide had dementia in 2021. This number is expected to nearly double every 20 years, reaching 82 million in 2030 and 152 million in 2050, according to the nonprofit organization Alzheimer's Disease International. The new findings resemble those from separate clinical trial research published in January in Neurology. That study treated people with hypertension for 3.3 years and followed them for a median of seven years. The investigation focused on lowering systolic blood pressure, the first number in a blood pressure reading, in older adults. Of the 4,200 people in the study who underwent cognitive assessment, the group that who decreased systolic blood pressure to less than 120 mm HG had a reduced risk of mild cognitive impairment or probable dementia; these participants' risk was lowered by 11 percent compared with people who decreased their systolic blood pressure to below 140 mm HG. The study didn't find any difference in the risk of probable dementia alone—possibly because it was smaller than the new study in China, because dementia can take many years to develop or because the trial was stopped early thanks to its overwhelmingly positive results in preventing cardiovascular events. Scientists don't know exactly how hypertension might contribute to dementia, says David Reboussin, a professor of biostatistics and data science at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and first author of the January Neurology study. But, he adds, 'if there is anything going on with small vessels and their ability to get oxygen to the brain tissue, then brain tissue will suffer. It will atrophy and die.'
