Remember This: High Blood Pressure May Steal Your Memory

Remember the advice your doctor gave you about the dangers of high blood pressure? Good, because in a few years you may not remember them, or much else. A new study by researchers at the University of California at Davis suggests that high blood pressure is more likely to cause cognitive impairment that the dreaded amyloid plaques that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. A UC news release reports that the study, which involved 61 men and women betweer 65 to 90 years old, used magnetic resonance imaging to measure vascular brain injury and positron emission tomography (PET) scans to measure beta amyloid deposition, and also tested for cognitive impairment and dementia. The researchers found that vascular injury, the kind that is likely to result from high blood pressure, was much more closely associated with cognitive impairment than were the plaques. Read more from UC Davis.