Can Managing Blood Pressure Slow Alzheimer's Disease?

A substudy of SPRINT MIND participants in JAMA Neurology indicated that aggressive blood pressure reduction in hypertensive older adults did not consistently impact Alzheimer's disease imaging biomarkers, reports Medpage Today . Magnetic resonance imaging markers of Alzheimer's — regional atrophy, cerebral blood flow, and mean fractional anisotropy — were similar over the four-year study period, regardless of whether patients received standard or aggressive blood pressure treatment. Yet intensive blood pressure treatment corresponded with a small but statistically significant larger shrinkage in hippocampal volume. "As vascular disease and Alzheimer's disease are the most common causes of cognitive decline in people of the age of those in the SPRINT study, we wanted to see whether brain biomarkers that are sensitive to these diseases could give a hint at whether either process was affected positively or adversely by the intervention," said the University of Pennsylvania's Ilya Nasrallah. "In short, we did not find a consistent difference between the two groups in measures of Alzheimer's disease or vascular disease, and all differences were of small magnitude."