(Alice Park/ Time) — Most people are familiar with the steps they can take to lower their risk of heart disease and cancer. Choosing your diet carefully, exercising and quitting smoking have all been shown to lower the risk of these diseases.
But when it comes to dementia — including dementia related to Alzheimer’s disease — scientists haven’t found many actionable steps that people can take to lower their risk. Genes play a prominent role in who develops dementia, especially Alzheimer’s, and age is also a dominant factor in the degenerative brain disorder, but neither are under human control.
Now, in a presentation at the annual meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Chicago, researchers report some of the most encouraging evidence yet for one risk factor that people may be able to control to lower their risk of dementia: their blood pressure. In an extension of the SPRINT study which looked at how low blood pressure could prevent heart disease, scientists also found that lower blood pressure is linked to a lower risk of dementia.
In the SPRINT Memory and Cognition in Decreased Hypertension (SPRINT-MIND) study, more than 9,300 elderly people who had had heart problems or were at higher risk of developing heart disease were randomly assigned to lower their blood pressure to either less than 120mmHg or 140 mmHg systolic. (Current guidelines, revised in 2017 after the study began, now recommend that most people keep the upper number, or systolic pressure, under 130mmHg.)
People who lowered their blood pressure to under 120mmHg lowered their risk of both mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the gateway to dementia, or probable dementia by 15%, compared to people who lowered their blood pressure to 140mmHg. (…)