The United States of America is known as having an unhealthy national population. With fast food being a staple in many Americans’ diets, the medical community has even named the standard American diet (SAD) after the country’s unhealthy populous.
One of the most common health issues faced by United States citizens is high blood pressure. Blood pressure, one of the four vital signs measured, tracked, and studied by medical researchers, is defined as the internal force of blood against arteries, which are responsible for transporting oxygenated blood from the heart to the extremities. When people make unhealthy lifestyle choices, they’re likely to suffer from unnaturally high blood pressure, which is known more properly in the medical community as hypertension.
According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some one-third of Americans – or roughly 75 million American adults – suffer form high blood pressure. Further, another one-third of the United States adult citizenry suffers from pre-high blood pressure, also known as prehypertension, or blood pressure readings that are higher than they should be but not quite at the level of high blood pressure.
While medical researchers have known that high blood pressure has been linked to a variety of health issues for many decades, they haven’t been able to identify everything in terms of what other health problems hypertension is related to.
A recent study from the United States National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, also known as the NINDS, found that the risk of developing dementia in people’s later years can be reduced by staving off hypertension.
The study, which was published earlier today, on Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2019, consisted of studying more than 9,000 people aged 50 and up. All patients were actively enrolled in the National Institutes of Health’s Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial, or SPRINT.
Researchers utilized a type of medical imaging known as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to look at the brains of the study’s participants. They tracked white matter lesions, which are, put simply, bad news for human brains.
By tracking the presence and growth of white matter lesions, the study found that people who simply followed the modern recommended treatments for dealing with high blood pressure were shown to suffer from cognitive impairments such as dementia more often than people whose blood pressure was more intensively controlled. In other words, to best keep neurological issues at bay, people should be doing more than what their physicians recommend.
