blood pressure and memory

Eat healthy and exercise regularly to keep your weight—and your blood pressure—down, and your mental ability up.

Clear your head: keep your blood pressure healthy.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—If you want to stay sharp as you get older, pay attention to your blood pressure. Using data from nearly 20,000 participants in the large, very diverse REGARDS—or, the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke—Study, researchers from the University of Alabama found a link between high diastolic blood pressure (that's the bottom number in a blood pressure measurement) and cognitive impairment, such as thinking and memory problems.

THE DETAILS: Researchers looked at data from 19,836 geographically and racially diverse men and women 45 years old and older who, as part of the REGARDS study, had had complete physicals, including blood pressure measurements, along with cognitive evaluations when they enrolled in the study. Blood pressure readings and cognitive assessments were then taken again in June 2007, and used for the purposes of this study. The researchers found that people with high diastolic blood pressure (90 or more) were more likely to have thinking and memory problems than people with lower diastolic readings. In fact, a 10 mm/Hg rise in diastolic blood pressure was associated with a 7 percent rise in the likelihood that a participant would have cognitive problems.

WHAT IT MEANS: Control your blood pressure, and you won’t simply be sidestepping a heart attack or stroke, it seems like you’ll be actively protecting your brain, too. Lead an active, healthy lifestyle to control your weight and see your blood pressure drop. “The very best way to reduce both systolic and diastolic blood pressure is to exercise moderately [or, at least 30 minutes a day, five days a week] and adopt a diet rich in legumes, vegetables, fruits, and fish,” says lead study author Georgios Tsivgoulis, MD, PhD, lecturer in neurology at Democritus University of Thrace in Greece and adjunct assistant professor of neurology at the Comprehensive Stroke Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Weight loss is associated with substantial reductions in blood pressure—especially in young people, who are more prone to suffer from diastolic hypertension.”