Takeaway
- Elevated blood pressure (BP) was associated with reduced risk for dementia in the short-term, possibly because of reverse causation.
- Long-term (>10 years) associations of elevated BP were less marked for dementia and differ by dementia subtypes.
Why this matters
- Confusion exists over the associations between BP and dementia or its sub-types.
Study design
- 2,593,629 patients (age, ≥40 years) with ≥1 BP measurement and without dementia were included using data from the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD).
- Funding: Alzheimer’s Society (UK grant 280).
Key results
- During a median follow-up of 8.2 years, 65,618 patients (incidence rate [IR], 2.91 per 1000 person-years) had incident dementia, of which 49,161 (IR, 2.18 per 1000 person-years) had Alzheimer’s disease (AD), 13,816 (IR, 0.61 per 1000 person-years) had vascular dementia and 2541 (IR, 0.11 per 1000 person-years) had other sub-types.
- During the 5 years of follow-up:
- Systolic BP (SBP) was moderately inversely associated with the risk for dementia (rate ratio [RR] per 10mmHg higher long-term average SBP, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.83-0.85).
- It was negatively associated with AD (RR, 0.83; 95% CI, 0.82-0.84) than vascular dementia (RR, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.87-0.93).
- During the 5-10 years of follow-up:
- A negative association between higher SBP and dementia was less marked (RR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.92-0.95).
- SBP was negatively associated with AD (RR, 0.93; 95% CI, 0.92-0.95), but the association with vascular dementia was non-significant (RR, 0.97; 95% CI, 0.94-1.01).
- During >10 years of follow-up, a very weak inverse association was observed between SBP and dementia (RR, 0.98; 95% CI, 0.97-0.99), which varied by age at index measurement (Pinteraction<.0001>
Limitations
- Risk of bias.
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