A brand new study by Australian researchers has shown that fluctuating blood pressure can increase the chance of dementia and vascular problems in older people.
Short blood pressure (BP) fluctuations inside 24 hours and over several days or even weeks are linked with impaired cognition, say University of South Australia (UniSA) researchers who led the study.
Study: Cross-sectional associations between short and mid-term blood pressure variability, cognition, and vascular stiffness in older adults. Image Credit: Recent Africa / Shutterstock
Higher systolic BP variations (the highest number that measures the pressure in arteries when a heart beats) are also linked with stiffening of the arteries, related to heart disease.
The findings have been published in Cerebral Circulation – Cognition and Behaviour journal.
Lead writer Daria Gutteridge, a Ph.D. candidate based in UniSA’s Cognitive Ageing and Impairment Neuroscience Laboratory (CAIN), says it’s well-known that hypertension is a risk factor for dementia. Still, little attention is paid to fluctuating blood pressure.
“Clinical treatments deal with hypertension, while ignoring the variability of blood pressure,” Gutteridge says.
“Blood pressure can fluctuate across different time frames – short and long – and this appears to heighten the chance of dementia and blood vessel health.”
To assist explore the mechanisms that link BP fluctuations with dementia, UniSA researchers recruited 70 healthy older adults aged 60-80 years with no signs of dementia or cognitive impairment.
Their blood pressure was monitored, they accomplished a cognitive test, and their arterial stiffness within the brain and arteries was measured using transcranial Doppler sonography and pulse wave evaluation.
“We found that higher blood pressure variability inside a day and across days was linked with reduced cognitive performance. We also found that higher blood pressure variations inside the systolic BP were correlated with higher blood vessel stiffness within the arteries.
“These results indicate that the differing types of BP variability likely reflect different underlying biological mechanisms, and that systolic and diastolic blood pressure variation are each vital for cognitive functioning in older adults.”
The researchers say the links were present in older adults with none clinically relevant cognitive impairment, meaning that BP variability could function an early clinical marker or treatment goal for cognitive impairment.
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