High blood pressure left untreated in midlife appears to cause memory loss later, a link that should serve as a health-care warning as the population ages, international researchers said Tuesday.
A team led by researchers from Erasmus University Medical School in the Netherlands found that for every increase of 10 points of systolic blood pressure, there was at least a 7 percent greater risk of diminished cognitive skills. A systolic blood pressure of 140 or less is considered normal in middle-aged adults."As the elderly population in the United States is expected to double by the year 2030, the number of persons with reduced cognitive function will increase," study author Lenore Launer wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"Programs designed to maintain or control systolic blood pressure levels in midlife could have an important impact on the occurrence of cognitive impairment. In this case, a public health strategy to achieve reduction in even mildly elevated systolic blood pressure would be warranted," he wrote.
Launer was joined by researchers from Kuakini Medical Center in Hawaii and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., in testing the mental skills of 3,735 elderly Japanese-American men who had participated in the Honolulu Heart Program begun in the 1960s.
The average age of the men was 78. Of those studied, 6.1 percent had blood pressure higher than 160 at midlife.
The authors said their findings were consistent with the Framingham study, which showed that untreated high blood pressure predicted poorer cognitive function 20 years later.