According to researchers, there has been a proven link between blood pressure and Alzheimer’s for years.

In 2014, according to the World Alzheimer Report, there were multiple studies that followed large groups of people for 15 to 40 years and showed that those who had high blood pressure were more likely to develop vascular dementia later in life. This is the second-most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s disease.

Vascular dementia is caused by reduced blood flow to the brain, which in turn starves brain cells of the oxygen and nutrients that are needed to function properly.

It is very important to understand exactly what high blood pressure is, as well as Alzheimer’s.

Your blood pressure is measured by the force applied to your arteries as blood is being circulated around the body by the heart. Blood pressures are reported as two numbers. The first or top number represents the systolic pressure, which is a measure of the pressure on your arteries per beat of the heart. The second or lower number is diastolic pressure, which measures the remaining pressure when the heart rests between beats. Normal blood pressure readings are around 120/80 mmHg.

High blood pressure is known as hypertension, and is diagnosed when your blood pressure is consistently above the 140/90 mmHg mark. This serious condition can lead to one suffering from heart attacks and even strokes.

Alzheimer’s disease is a non-reversible, progressive brain disorder that destroys memory and thinking skills slowly. The ability to carry out some of the simplest tasks is even compromised. For most people, symptoms of this disease first appear in their mid-60s. It is estimated that nearly 5.5 million Americans suffer from dementia caused by Alzheimer’s.

According to the CDC, Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth-leading cause of death in the U.S., and it is the fifth-leading cause among those 65 and over.

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High blood pressure can cause damage to the small blood vessels in the brain, affecting parts of the brain that are responsible for thinking and memory.

According to a recent report, blood pressure medication can improve the blood flow to a key brain region in people who are battling Alzheimer’s disease. A small clinical trial recently conducted revealed these findings.

In this trial that studied about 44 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s, patients were randomly assigned to take a blood pressure drug called nilvadipine or inactive placebo pills for six consecutive months.

By the end of this study, patients who were on the drug, showed an increase of 20% with their blood flow to the hippocampus, which is a brain structure that is involved in memory and learning that is considered one of the first areas to become damaged by Alzheimer’s. While studies have not proven that blood pressure medication can actually aid in the reduction of Alzheimer’s, researchers are still investigating.

As research continues, there are several things that you can do to bring your blood pressure down:

Eat real food

Avoid processed foods as much as possible — that means even those canned vegetables, which often are filled with high sodium. Consume a diet high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy, poultry, fish and nuts.

Nix the extra weight

Getting rid of extra weight can have profound effects on your blood pressure. Losing weight can shave off close to 5 points off of the systolic (top number) blood pressure, and nearly 4 off of the diastolic (bottom number).

Monitor your blood pressure at home

By monitoring your blood pressure at home, you can improve your blood pressure more than just having it checked when you visit your doctor. You can ask your doctor for recommendations on home blood pressure cuffs. There are also many pharmacies and drugstores that offer free blood pressure readings.

The post Do you know the connection between blood pressure and Alzheimer’s? appeared first on MyMedicPlus.

(MENAFN – The Conversation) If you want to reduce your risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease, there is no end ofadviceon theinternet telling youhow to do it: keep your blood pressure and blood sugar in check, lose weight, exercise more, avoid getting type 2 diabetes. Of course, doing these things is good for your general health, but ourlatest studyshows they probably do nothing to reduce your risk of getting Alzheimer’s.

Around50m peoplesuffer from dementia, and that number is expected to triple in the next three decades. The most common form of dementia isAlzheimer’s . People with this disease have a build-up of two proteins in the brain (beta-amyloid and tau), but it is not known if these proteins are a cause or a consequence of the disease. What we do know is that this proliferation of tangled proteins stops brain cells working properly, hence the typical symptoms of dementia: memory loss, confusion, difficulty performing everyday tasks, changes of behaviour, hallucinations.

In the past decade, there has been an emphasis on the role of cardiovascular disease and diabetes in the development of dementia. For a while, researchers have known that these things are associated withvascular dementia . Vascular dementia occurs because of damage to blood vessels, such asatherosclerosis , which increases the risk of dangerous bleeds or blood clots in the brain. Blood clots and bleeds stop oxygen getting to parts of the brain which then leads to the death of those brain cells.

Atherosclerosis increases the risk of bleeds and blood clots in the brain.
logika600/Shutterstock

High blood pressure and diabetesincrease the risk of atherosclerosis and so will affect the delivery of oxygen to the brain. Some argue that the consequence of these diseases increases the changes seen in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, so it is believed that high blood pressure and diabetes increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

When considering the link between these factors, it is important to bear in mind how accurate dementia diagnoses are. With the tools we have today, a person will get a dementia diagnosis, for example, Alzheimer’s or vascular dementia, with a60-90% accuracy . So between 10-30% of the people diagnosed with dementia get the wrong diagnosis.

The only accurate diagnosis

Most research about the association between high blood pressure, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease is done in a clinic. This means that the people in these studies are alive and may have been wrongly diagnosed. The only way to diagnose a person’s dementia disorder with nearly 100% accuracy is through autopsy, analysing brain samples under a microscope, so the best way to do research on this topic is through studies based on autopsies where you can confirm that the subjects had the correct diagnoses. And this is the approach we took with ourlatest study .

We wanted to investigate if the occurrence of high blood pressure and diabetes differed between people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s compared with those diagnosed with vascular dementia. Our research was based on 268 deceased patients, older than 65. We analysed brain samples to confirm a diagnosis of Alzheimer´s or vascular dementia. Using medical records and theSwedish National Diabetes Registerwe were able to determine if our subjects had hypertension or diabetes, or both.

We found a high occurrence of both high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes among the subjects with vascular dementia. The subjects with Alzheimer’s showed a distinctly lower frequency of the two diseases.

In the group with Alzheimer’s, 37% had had high blood pressure. The corresponding proportion was 74% in the group with vascular dementia. And 12% of the group with Alzheimer’s had suffered from diabetes, compared with 31% in the group with vascular dementia. AmongSwedes , 16% above 65 years have diabetes. One may speculate that by having Alzheimer’s you have a lower risk of getting diabetes, or by having diabetes you have a lower risk of getting Alzheimer’s.

Despite these results, it is still important to keep controlling your blood pressure and avoid getting type 2 diabetes. These are factors that lead to cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the world. Instead, we hope that our findings can increase the knowledge about these risk factors and dementia types. The correct associations between risk factors and disease types will help scientists avoid drawing misleading conclusions and refrain from meaningless treatment attempts.

The post Alzheimer’s disease not linked to type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure new study appeared first on MyMedicPlus.