The condition typically has no symptoms so it is vital to get checked out.
Higher blood pressure in mid-life is linked to brain damage in later life.
High diastolic blood pressure — the pressure between heart beats — before age 50 is particularly strongly linked to brain damage in later life.
Diastolic blood pressure is the second or bottom number — and is usually considered high if it is over 90.
High blood pressure typically has no symptoms so it is vital to get checked out.
The condition is usually treated with a healthy diet, exercise and medication.
Dr Karolina Wartolowska, the study’s first author, explained the results:
“We made two important findings.
Firstly, the study showed that diastolic blood pressure in people in their 40s and 50s is associated with more extensive brain damage years later.
This means that it is not just the systolic blood pressure, the first, higher number, but the diastolic blood pressure, the second, lower number, that is important to prevent brain tissue damage.
Many people may think of hypertension and stroke as diseases of older people, but our results suggest that if we would like to keep a healthy brain well into our 60s and 70s, we may have to make sure our blood pressure, including the diastolic blood pressure, stays within a healthy range when we are in our 40s and 50s.
The second important finding is that any increase in blood pressure beyond the normal range is associated with a higher amount of white matter hyperintensities.
This suggests that even slightly elevated blood pressure before it meets the criteria for treating hypertension has a damaging effect on brain tissue.”
The study included 37,041 people who were tracked over about ten years.
The results showed that people with high blood pressure are more likely to have damage to the small blood vessels in the brain.
These types of changes to blood vessels are linked to dementia, stroke, depression and problems with thinking.
Dr Wartolowska said:
“Not all people develop these changes as they age, but they are present in more than 50 per cent of patients over the age of 65 and most people over the age of 80 even without high blood pressure, but it is more likely to develop with higher blood pressure and more likely to become severe.”
High blood pressure may cause smaller blood vessels in the brain to become leaky and/or larger blood vessels to become stiffer.
Both can cause brain damage.
Dr Wartolowska said:
“The long time interval between the effects of blood pressure in midlife and the harms in late life emphasises how important it is to control blood pressure long-term, and that research has to adapt to consider the very long-term effects of often asymptomatic problems in midlife.”
The study was published in the European Heart Journal (Wartolowska et al., 2020).
