Blood pressure medication reduces the risk of dementia

Around 2.5 million Swedes suffer from high blood pressure. Many are affected without knowing it, but an untreated high blood pressure increases the risk of both heart attack and stroke. In recent years, researchers have also begun to understand that high blood pressure is also bad news for the brain. In so far as the high pressure increases the risk of dementia, especially vascular ones.

– The high pressure of hammering on the organs and causing damage. The vessels in the brain are also damaged. If there is major injuries, it may be a stroke, but if the damage is less, we may have lowered brain function. People who have gone with an untreated high blood pressure for a long time will be slow in the head, simply, says one of Sweden’s foremost authorities in the field, Peter M Nilsson, chief physician and senior professor in clinical cardiac research at Lund University, to DN.

However, if people suffering from high blood pressure reduce their risk of impaired brain function if they begin to treat blood pressure with drugs has been more unclear.

In an attempt To find out more lots of researchers 163 villages in the Chinese countryside. In half of the villages, all the more than 17,400 people who were 40 or older and who had high blood pressure were intensified and free medication, as well as advice on lifestyle changes and information on how to monitor their blood pressure. The almost 16,600 people in the control villages, on the other hand, received only advice and information (as well as self -financed medication, where applicable). After 48 months, the presence of dementia in both groups was evaluated.

The result, as now is reported in Nature Medicineshows that the presence of dementia and cognitive disability among the participants in the group where blood pressure was intensively treated with the help of medicines was 15 and 16 percent lower after only four years, compared to the group that received custom blood pressure medication.

– It was thus a relative risk reduction. In absolute terms, there are not so many patients. On the other hand, they were relatively young, only 63 years on average, when the study started, and they were already checked after four years. It says something about the effect an elevated blood pressure has on the brain, says Peter M Nilsson, who himself was not involved in the current study.

Peter M Nilsson thinks The fact that the study is well conducted and that the result in many ways confirms a larger metal analysis that was presented a couple of years ago. If you treat your high blood pressure with medication, you also reduce the risk of impaired brain function and dementia.

However, he says, stroke is more common in countries such as China and Japan than in the Western world, and since the risk of stroke and vascular dementia is interconnected, it is not certain that the result would be the same if a corresponding treatment study was conducted here.

-But what we can learn from this study is that they used non-doctors primarily in the patient contacts. Since blood pressure patients are so many, even in Sweden, we must find new ways to help them, for example in primary care. One way could be to give well -trained nurses a greater responsibility in the meeting with these patients.

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