Washington [US]February 8 (ANI): Higher blood pressure at night than during the day can be a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease in older men, suggests a new study from researchers at Uppsala University. Higher BP at night than during the day can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The study has now been published in the journal Hypertension.
‘Dementia’ is an umbrella term used to describe a category of symptoms characterized by behavioral changes and gradually declining cognitive and social abilities. Many factors, including high blood pressure (high blood pressure), affect the risk of developing these symptoms.
Under healthy conditions, blood pressure (BP) varies over 24 hours, with the lowest values reached at night. Doctors call this nocturnal drop in blood pressure “dipping”.
But in some people, this BP pattern is reversed: their nocturnal BP is higher than during the day. This blood pressure profile is known as “reverse dipping”.
“The night is a critical period for brain health. For example, it has previously been shown that the brain clears waste products during sleep in animals and that this clearance is jeopardized by abnormal blood pressure patterns. Since the night also represents a critical time window for human brain health, we investigated hypertension. at night, seen in reverse dipping, is associated with a higher risk of dementia in older men, says Christian Benedict, associate professor at Uppsala University’s Department of Neuroscience, and senior author of the study.
To test this hypothesis, the researchers used observational data from one thousand Swedish older men who were followed for a maximum of 24 years. The men included were in their early seventies at the beginning of the study “The risk of being diagnosed with dementia was 1.64 times higher among men with reverse dipping compared to those with normal dipping. Reverse dipping mainly increased the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, says Xiao Tan, a postdoctoral fellow in the same department and the first author of this research.
“Our cohort consisted only of older men. Thus, our results must be replicated in older women,” says Benedict.
According to the researchers, an interesting next step would be to investigate whether the intake of antihypertensive (BP-lowering) drugs at night can reduce the risk of older men developing Alzheimer’s disease. (ANI)
Source: sn.dk