Causes Of Dementia
High Blood Pressure as one of the Leading Causes of Dementia
Some among us, the lucky ones, actually feel it when our blood pressure rises into hypertension territory. The body flutters, the heart pounds almost audibly, and we can't wait to take the right medication to feel normal again. And then there are those who do have a high blood pressure health situation, but never actually feel any the worse off for it; when people are prescribed medication for a problem they don't actually feel, chances are that on a day they are in a hurry to leave to work, or a day they absently leave their medicines at home on their way somewhere, that they might just skip a dose. For these people, the latest research findings should be an eye-opener. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, has been discovered to be one of the scariest causes of dementia in old age.
There has been a lot of research in this area now; scientists have been scanning the brains of people who have high blood pressure, and they've seen that brains really get damaged when blood pumps through at high pressure. The damage, which neurosurgeons see as scarring in the brain MRIs, are sure causes of Alzheimer's and dementia, they feel. The scars they mention, don't actually do any harm when you're young when you are confident of your abilities. They start expressing themselves, 50 years from then. At a time you'll probably forget what you did to deserve this kind of fate.
Dementia can be such an expensive disease for the nation to treat on the whole. Perhaps to head off an epidemic of people with dementia who will need care the entire duration of their old age, the National Institute of Health is trying to rally as much support behind this new insight as possible. They are conducting a major new study with thousands of people who have hypertension, to see if it will protect people better for the future, and to recommend that doctors prescribe hypertension patients more blood pressure medicine than ever before. They figure that if doctors would try and get their patients' blood pressure a bit lower than normal, it should help the heart survive better for longer, and it should help the brain function completely normally.
This has been quite a recent development; even a year ago, no one really knew to think of hypertension as the thing that could feature at the top among causes of dementia. Now with all this research, it is recognized that hypertension is the number one factor in a person's lifestyle, that could lead to poor brain health later on. Actually, doctors have always known that conditions like diabetes and being overweight, increase the likelihood that you could get dementia. They just never knew that these could bring on dementia severe enough to lead to Alzheimer's as well, which is what they expect now.
Once you get constant blood pressure that goes above 140/90, the white matter in your brain begins to develop lesions and scars. Even tiny elevations in your blood pressure can damage the capillaries that nourish the cells of the brain with blood. Let's hope that they get that study going really quickly, to get doctors to lower your blood pressure far below what they achieve today.
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