High Blood Pressure and Dementia Connection Explained

The journal Stroke has just published a study on the connection between high blood pressure and dementia, which was conducted by a team of scientists led by the UC Davis School of Medicine.

Not only does this connection give us a way to detect dementia 20-30 years before it strikes, it (more importantly) also leads us to find a solid cure for both high blood pressure and an early onset of memory loss and dementia.

To be precise, the study traced the connection from lifestyle, to high blood pressure, to atherosclerosis, to a decrease in brain matter.

For data, they used health statistics from approximately 1,900 people whose information was collected by the Framingham Heart Study.

They considered three important test scores:

– an arterial tonometry measurement of blood pressure

– a carotid femoral pulse wave velocity measurement of artery hardening (atherosclerosis)

– an MRI brain scan as a measurement of brain volume and structure.

They found that when compared to people with normal arterial structure, those with hardened arteries had higher blood pressure, less white brain matter, and structurally damaged grey brain matter.

Using this data, the researchers speculated the following connection:

1. Lifestyle factors like high cholesterol diets and a lack of exercise caused both high blood pressure and a buildup of plaque in your arteries.

2. This will cause your arteries to harden or stiffen.

3. Stiff arteries further increase blood pressure, because your heart must pump a lot harder to get blood through these inflexible plaque-clogged arteries.

4. Together, all this arterial damage restricts the blood flow to your organs, including your brain.

5. Insufficient blood flow to the brain then causes atrophy in the white and grey matter.

This shows us that lowering blood pressure and improving cardiovascular health is essential to our cognitive function further down the road.

This gives you one more reason to do everything in your power to lower your blood pressure. The most effective method to do so lies in the simple blood pressure exercises that can be found here…

But an interesting aspect for me is that this is further proof of the main underlying cause of Alzheimer’s and Dementia – a cause that I’ve been preaching for years now.

I’m talking about lack of oxygen-filled blood to the brain.

And for that cause, I discovered a simple set of exercises that load your brain with oxygen and nutrition and could, therefore, reverse an early onset of memory loss, dementia – you can try these brain booster exercises for yourself here…