Blood Pressure Study Raises New Concern

High blood pressure speeds the loss of memory and other cognitive abilities in the elderly and causes their brains to shrink, a study has found.

The changes occur in spite of drug therapy to control blood pressure, according to Gene E. Alexander, the study’s senior investigator.

The results suggest that more-effective treatment may be needed for elderly patients with high blood pressure, Alexander said.

But a neurologist who was not involved with the study said further work is needed before standard therapies are changed.

“The differences [in brain size and cognitive performance] were clearly significant but seemed overall to be relatively small,” said Larry Goldstein, an associate professor of medicine and neurology at Duke University Medical Center and Durham Veterans Administration Hospital in North Carolina.

Alexander and other researchers at the National Institutes on Aging of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., compared people with normal blood pressure in two age groups--56 to 69 years old and 70 to 84 years old--with people who had long-standing histories of well-controlled high blood pressure.