High Blood Pressure Hurts Young Brains

In previous articles, we discussed how high blood pressure in your 40s and 50s leads to early cognitive decline as you age.

But how about even younger people? How about teenagers, and even kids?

A new study shows high blood pressure begins to impact you much earlier than previously thought. And it’s in a different way than you would think.

The fact that high blood pressure leads to cognitive decline in adults made researchers at a couple of American universities wonder whether high blood pressure during childhood could cause a decline in cognitive abilities as well. They set out to find out, and published the results in the Journal of Pediatrics.

They recruited 75 children between the ages of 10 and 18 with high blood pressure to compare with 75 kids whose blood pressure was normal.

Kids with ADHD, sleep apnea, and learning disabilities were excluded, as these conditions are known to reduce cognitive function and would thus interfere with the result.

Those with high blood pressure had more sleep problems and fat in their blood streams than the non-hypertensives did.

Importantly for the subject of the study, the hypertensive kids scored lower than the others did on tests of memory, verbal memory, visual memory, attention, information processing speed, and executive functions and decision-making.

There was no difference in general intelligence, though.

Those kids with sleep difficulties scored the lowest of all the kids on executive function and decision-making.

The researchers emphasized that the hypertensive kids still scored in the normal range on all the tests, so the parents did not have to panic about cognitive impairment. But they did score verifiably lower than their peers did.

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