Older individuals with high blood pressure are more likely to have brain lesions than those without high blood pressure and may also have protein tangles, a sign of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published in Neurology on July 11.
Coauthor Zoe Arvanitakis, a neurologist at Rush University Medical Center, says these “preliminary data” need further exploration, according to the Associated Press. “We can’t be alarmist,” she says.
According to a statement, the researchers were keen to learn if blood pressure had links to signs of brain aging. They tracked 1,288 people who were over the age of 65 until their deaths, an average of eight years. The scientists measured the blood pressure of the subjects once every year and examined their brains postmortem.
Of the total number of subjects, two-thirds of the subjects had high blood pressure, while about half had one or more brain infarcts, necrotic regions caused ...
