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Mental Deficits Might Be Caused By Heart Disease! Many forms of mental health issues such as depression and stress could affect heart disease. While scientists still could not associate stress and heart disease with certainty, there is a growing belief that it is an additional risk factor for heart disease. Scientists suspect that stress can raise hormones like adrenaline that might increase the blood pressure and heart rate. On the other hand, researchers have also noted cardiovascular disease can cause mental deficits. In 2012, a group of Australian researchers found that heart failure and disease caused by reduced blood supply to the heart could lead to a loss of brain cells and reduced cognitive abilities. Their findings, which were published online January 31, 2012 in the ‘European Heart Journal’, suggested that heart disease might affect a part of the brains that are responsible for mentally demanding tasks. Most previous studies indicated that people develop cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke) after midlife and late-life might affect cognitive functions in their later years. According to a new study, young adults with cardiac risk factors like high blood pressure and elevated glucose levels could have significantly worse cognitive function in middle age. Researchers from University of California, San Francisco and other institutions published their findings online March 31, 2014 in journal ‘Circulation’.
Data was examined from 3381 young adults aged between 18 and 30 in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study. CARDIA began enrolling thousands of participants nationwide in 1985 aiming to understand how heart disease developed in black and white adults. For a period of 25 years, cardiovascular risk factors were measured every 2 to 5 years by tests to measure their executive function (the ability to plan, organize and pay attention to detail), mental processing speed and verbal memory. Several factors such as high blood pressure, elevated blood glucose, and high cholesterol levels were used to identify cardiovascular health. It was found that those whose blood pressure and glucose level exceeded recommended levels performed worse on all the 3 tests, and those with high cholesterol was associated only with poor verbal memory. It also appeared that the effects were cumulative, meaning the longer the blood pressure, fasting blood sugar and cholesterol remain higher than recommended levels, the greater the chances for mental disorders later. Though the reasons behind the effects were unclear, the researchers cited several mechanisms that include reduced blood supply to the brain, changes in brain structure and increased inflammation and oxidative stress that can damage neurons. Another possibility is that these risk factors might interfere with the clearance of amyloid proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease. However, the cardiovascular problems seen in the study’s participants were not linked to dementia later in life. One limitation of the study is that the baseline data on the participants' cognitive function were not measured making it impossible for researchers to estimate the cognitive change caused by these risk factors. The researchers hope that similar study will be carried out with even younger people and that health officials might wish to consider recommending lower limits of blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels. Since all the cardiovascular risk factors mentioned are quite modifiable, it is possible for young adults to lower their risk of developing dementia through diet and exercise, or even by taking medications. Dementia is a term used to describe brain disorders or damage that cause people to have problems with their memory, language and thinking. The best-known and most common example of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease, which is a neurological disorder caused by death of brain cells. Alzheimer’s disease usually starts mild and gets progressively worse. It was estimated that 4.7 million people aged 65 and above in the United States were living with Alzheimer’s disease in 2010.
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