Uncontrolled High Blood Pressure is a High-Risk Condition
Reported December 5, 2005
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Uncontrolled hypertension, or blood pressure, puts people at higher risk for sharper drops in short-term memory loss and verbal ability, according to a recent study.
Researchers at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Boston Healthcare System, Harvard Medical School and the Boston University School of Public Health in Boston examined a subset of men in the VA Normative Aging Study — a longitudinal study that started in 1963 and added neuropsychological tests in 1993. This smaller portion of the study included 357 men averaging 67 years of age, who lived in the community and didn’t have dementia or other serious medical problems.
The study revealed the older the man, the predictably lower his overall neuropsychological performance. The older men in the sample with uncontrolled hypertension, however, preformed significantly worse on specific tests of verbal fluency and immediate recall of a word list.
During the study, uncontrolled hypertensive decrements on fluency were 2.4-times as great as for those with normal pressure; their decrement with immediate recall was 1.3-times as great. According to investigators, that means by age 80, men with uncontrolled hypertension could generate seven fewer words in a given category and recall nearly one and a half fewer words on average than men with a healthy blood pressure.
“The finding suggest, that uncontrolled hypertension produces specific cognitive deficits beyond those attributable to age alone,” study authors say. They also say because men using anti-hypertensive drugs to control hypertension during the study did just as well as men with naturally normal blood pressure this study further demonstrates that anti-hypertensive drugs do not hurt cognition.
SOURCE: Neuropsychology,2005;19:770-777