Taking care of your heart may come with a major bonus: a longer dementia-free life.That’s according to a new study that found a link between avoiding three major vascular risk factors—smoking, having diabetes, and having abnormal blood pressure—and roughly 13 more years without dementia.1
The findings, which were published in the journal Neurology, highlight the interconnectedness of brain and heart health—and suggest that you can take care of both at the same time.
“Prevention doesn’t make dementia disappear,” said Josef Coresh, MD, PhD, the founding director of the Optimal Aging Institute at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and one of the study’s authors. “But it buys healthy years and shifts risk later.”
A Closer Look at the Study
For the study, the researchers tracked 12,409 adults from four different U.S. communities between the early 1990s and 2022. The participants, whose average age was 56 at the study’s start, underwent physical examinations at baseline and again roughly 26 years later. Cognitive testing, phone interviews, and hospital and death records helped researchers determine who developed dementia during that period.
After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that people who didn’t smoke, didn’t have diabetes, and didn’t have high or low blood pressure had an average of 30.1 dementia-free years between ages 55 and 95, compared with just 17.5 years for those with all three factors.
However, people with the worst vascular health were also more likely to die before developing dementia, which may have contributed to the difference in dementia-free years.
This isn’t the first study to suggest that having fewer vascular risk factors benefits the brain—and there’s a reason that may be the case. Smoking and conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes can damage the blood vessels that supply the brain in a variety of ways, such as by causing a stroke, reducing blood flow, and leading to chronic inflammation, Coresh explained.
But Coresh said the new research is distinct because it looked specifically at time free of dementia rather than reporting findings in terms of percentages or statistics comparing one group with another. Years free of disease is “a measure patients and clinicians can use more readily,” he said.
Should You Focus on These Three Factors to Delay Dementia?
It’s well established that not smoking and keeping blood pressure and blood sugar levels under control can benefit overall health. But because of some important caveats, this study alone can’t tell us for sure whether those factors can help ward off dementia.
For one, only 176 participants had all three risk factors, which is a relatively small group. The risk factors were also measured only once, during midlife, making it difficult to draw broad conclusions. And the study was observational, meaning it can show only a link between the three factors and dementia-free years—not causation.
People who focus on controlling their blood pressure also tend to make time for exercise and sleep, and may even have better healthcare access, all of which could help explain a delayed dementia onset, pointed out Nir Barzilai, MD, a professor of genetics and medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and director of the Institute for Geroscience, who wasn’t involved with the new study.
Still, the association between fewer vascular risk factors and more dementia-free time makes sense to Rudy Tanzi, MD, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the McCance Center for Brain Health, MGH, who also wasn’t involved with the research.
“You have to keep in mind that if you’re going to get dementia or Alzheimer’s disease at 80, that disease process probably began at 50,” he said. “If you’re doing the right things, you might be curbing that pathology from beginning in the brain.”
While Tanzi called the results “great news,” he said it’s important to remember that while avoiding smoking, diabetes, and high blood pressure are helpful, there are many factors that can influence brain health as you age.
“Don’t just rely on those three things,” he said. “I don’t think that’s going to be enough.”
Instead, Tanzi recommends a range of lifestyle habits, including prioritizing adequate sleep and having a healthy diet that includes as few ultra-processed foods as possible. He said it’s also important to track metrics like body mass index and cholesterol levels.
Source: Health
