A recent study has revealed a surprising link between high blood pressure and the risk of Alzheimer's disease.
The findings reveal people with a genetic predisposition to high blood pressure tend to have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, but the researchers believe this link is caused by anti-hypertension medication rather than the high blood pressure itself, Brigham Young University reported.
"It's likely that this protective effect is coming from antihypertensive drugs," said co-author John Kauwe, associate professor of biology at BYU. "These drugs are already FDA approved. We need to take a serious look at them for Alzheimer's prevention."
To make their findings, a team of researchers looked at 17,008 individuals with Alzheimer's and 37,154 people without the condition who were involved in the Alzheimer's Disease Genetics Consortium and the International Genomics of Alzheimer's Project. The researchers employed supercomputing and bioinformatics to create 32 different datasets for analysis. The researchers examined the link between Alzheimer's disease and a number of health condition such as diabetes and high blood pressure. The findings a revealed a significant link between higher systolic blood pressure and reduced Alzheimer's risk.
"Our results are the opposite of what people might think," said fellow co-author Paul Crane, a University of Washington associate professor of internal medicine. "It may be that high blood pressure is protective, or it may be that something that people with high blood pressure are exposed to more often, such as antihypertensive medication, is protecting them from Alzheimer's disease."
The team backed up their findings by using "Mendelian randomization" to control for other risk factors that could influence their results.
"This is to date the most authoritative paper looking at causal relationships between Alzheimer's disease and these potentially modifiable factors," Kauwe said. "In terms of the number of samples, it can't get bigger at this point."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal PLOS Medicine and the study included researchers from Cambridge, the University of Washington and several other institutions.
