Lower Blood Pressure a Memory Booster

Helps older folks avoid gaffes, study finds

TUESDAY, Sept. 23, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Remembering to take blood pressure medication might help older people remember other things, such as that familiar telephone number that just slips away for no good reason.

Detailed studies of blood flow in the brain and memory skills found a slight but potentially significant differences in older volunteers who had their blood pressure under the recommended level and those who didn't, J. Richard Jennings, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, told the American Heart Association's 57th Annual High Blood Pressure Research Conference in Washington, D.C.

Jennings' study enlisted 59 volunteers, average age 60, with blood pressure below the then-recommended 140/90 blood pressure reading and another 37, average age 61, with readings that put them in the hypertension region, with an average of 144/84.

All of them had tests to measure baseline memory and reasoning abilities, and ultrasound imaging of the carotid arteries, the vessels in the neck that supply blood to the brain. Then they took a series of computer-based everyday memory tests while scans recorded activity in parts of the brain involved in memory. For example, someone was asked to look up a phone number, walk to another room and dial that number.

It's the kind of short-term memory task that often troubles older people, who will have to look the number up again, Jennings says. And sure enough, "blood flow wasn't as rapidly or fully available among people with high blood pressure as it was in the non-hypertensive volunteers," he says.

And a slightly lower level of performance accompanied that diminished blood flow, Jennings says. The finding lends some support to the guiding theory behind the experiment, that "the brain protects itself when you have high blood pressure by expanding blood vessels in different parts of the brain," he says.

Some blood pressure medications have a greater effect on those brain blood flows than others, Jennings says. He is now in the middle of a trial, scheduled to run four years and funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, to see how important those differences might be in mental ability.

The trial is testing an angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor against a beta blocker. Both are widely used hypertension drugs, but the ACE inhibitor has a stronger effect on blood flow than the beta blocker. "I'll be ready to talk about the results in about two and a half years," Jennings says.

His studies have wider implications, he says. "As we go from 45 to 75, we all probably suffer some decline in cognitive function," Jennings says. "It isn't clear whether that is due to aging alone, or to the chronic diseases that develop as we get older, such as atherosclerosis or diabetes."

So someday, he says, this line of research could determine "whether we would all have perfectly normal mental function at age 75 if we are perfectly healthy."

His findings will have to be confirmed by a larger study, says Dr. Daniel C. Fisher, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at New York University and a spokesman for the American Heart Association, but they add another facet to the importance of controlling blood pressure.

"This is one more reason why we need to focus on blood pressure as a risk factor not only for heart disease but also other problems in older people," Fisher says. "Keeping blood pressure under control also helps prevent stroke and other cardiovascular problems. The possible effect on memory would be an added benefit."

More information

Medications and other ways to control blood pressure are described by the American Heart Association or the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

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