Lowering blood pressure reduces strokes and heart attacks, and a researcher at Imperial College London says there is an extra benefit: treatment may also reduce the chances of dementia.
A study of older people with high blood pressure examined whether their treatment lowered the chance of developing any type of dementia.
One in four people has high blood pressure that is undiagnosed or untreated. This raises the risk of dementia caused by reduced blood flow, and so oxygen, to the brain: vascular dementia, which makes up a quarter of dementia cases.
According to the Alzheimer's Society, vascular dementia is six times more common in people who had high blood pressure at 40 to 50 years old, and if high blood pressure were found and treated properly, 15,000 people a year could be spared it. So blood pressure treatment doesn't only protect the heart from heart attacks and strokes: it reduced dementia in older people by about 13%. The study was published in The Lancet Neurology.
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