Recent news has raised expectations that a side effect of taking some blood pressure medicines is that certain drugs have been identified as helping to prevent dementia - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7492959.stmResearch has found a definite link between high blood pressure and dementia. A study published in Lancet Neurology journal by an Imperial College medical research team suggests that treatment for high blood pressure will reduce this by 15%.
Controlling blood pressure from middle-age onwards may dramatically reduce the chances of developing dementia, researchers have said.
Two studies support a link between high blood pressure and dementia risk - with one by an Imperial College London team suggesting treatment could cut this.
In the UK at least one in three people aged over 55 has high blood pressure that remains undiagnosed or untreated. the only way to know if you have high blood pressure is to have it measured with a blood pressure monitor
Of course it is crucial that efforts to detect and treat high blood pressure to reduce stroke and heart disease are increased, even without the additional results on dementia.
Recent announcements that one of the jobs UK doctors least enjoy - taking blood pressure - can now be done by patients themselves with pants that measure blood pressure and using mobile broadband technology should mean more and more people maintaining a healthy lifestyle and knowing their blood pressure readings.
The trial was stopped early after the benefits of treatment in terms of reducing strokes and heart disease were so obvious it became unethical to deny them to everyone.
Although this meant that no benefits in terms of dementia could be found, when these results were combined with other similar studies in different age groups, the incidence of dementia was 13% lower in the treated groups.
The precise reasons why high blood pressure might increase the risk of dementia are not fully understood. Many medical professionals believe that it can starve the brain of oxygen which is carried by the blood flow to the brain.
Those with restricted blood flow are often described as having "vascular dementia", and account for around 25% of dementia patients.
Other types of dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease, have no obvious link to blood flow, but some experts think that blood pressure may still be somehow contributory in some cases.
The Lancet Neurology study looked at a trial of elderly patients with high blood pressure to see if those who were receiving treatment were less likely to develop any form of dementia compared with those left untreated.
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