Staying sharp and warding off dementia might rely, in part, on doing your best to keep high blood pressure at bay. So finds a new study that suggests strict control of hypertension may help prevent dementia.

In the study, researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) used MRIs to scan the brains of hundreds of patients with high blood pressure.

They found that people who got “intensive” control of their high blood pressure showed a slowing of accumulation of certain lesions in the brain’s white matter, compared to people who got “standard” blood pressure treatment.

These white matter lesions reflect changes deep inside the brain, said the team led by Dr. Clinton Wright, director of the Division of Clinical Research at NINDS.

Prior research has suggested that people with high blood pressure are at increased risk for accumulation of white matter lesions and also for mental decline and dementia, he said.

The NINDS-funded study was published Aug. 13 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Getting blood pressure numbers to healthy levels “significantly reduced white matter lesion accumulation in people who had a higher chance of experiencing this kind of damage because they had high blood pressure,” Wright said in a NINDS news release.

The study also found that patients who received intensive blood pressure control had slightly more loss of the brain’s volume, compared to people who got standard treatment. The effect was seen predominantly in men.

However, this loss was generally very small and of unclear clinical significance, the researchers said.

The patients in the study enrolled in the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT). The trial involved nearly 9,300 people age 50 or older.

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