LOWERING BLOOD PRESSURE HELPS PREVENT MEMORY LOSS

About 50 million people worldwide have loss of memory, and Alzheimer’s is the most common type. There is no cure — current medicines just ease symptoms — so prevention is key.

Roughly half of adults in the United States have high blood pressure under guidelines adopted last year that define it as a top number of 130 or more, rather than 140. Normal is under 120.

High pressure has long been linked to a higher risk for dementia(impaired memory). But it’s not been known if lowering pressure would reduce that risk or by how much.

ABOUT THE STUDY

It involved more than 9, 300 people with high pressure. Half got two medicines, on average, to get their top reading below 140. The rest got three drugs, on average, and aimed for 120. The top pressure averaged 121 in the intensive-treatment group and 135 in the other group. The study was stopped in 2015, nearly two years early, when it became clear that lower pressure helped prevent heart problems and deaths. But tests of thinking skills continued for two more years, and these new results were revealed now

Researchers saw a 19 % lower risk of mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, in the intensive-treatment group — 285 cases versus 348 in the higher pressure group. About half of people with MCI develop dementia over the next five years.

“It’s really more important to prevent MCI than dementia in some ways. It’s like preventing high cholesterol rather than a heart attack, ”

There also were fewer dementia cases in the intensive-treatment group but there were too few to say lower blood pressure was the reason. Dementia takes longer to develop than mild impairment does, so doctors think the difference may widen over time