Plaques in the arteries (blood vessels) is a common cause of heart attack or stroke. It takes years of unhealthy lifestyles to develop plaques in your arteries, and these plaques can give you a clue that your brain is also developing plaque inside, which is the hallmark of Alzheimer's Disease. You will not notice these changes in early years since you don't have any signs or symptoms of dementia.
The latest study published yesterday (October 16,2013) in the online issue of Journal Neurology (which is the official journal of American Academy of Neurology) adds new evidence to this fact, and concludes that even among the elderly people, with no signs of dementia, hardening of arteries has a positive correlation with developing beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. Beta- amyloid plaque is responsible for Alzheimer's disease.
The study involved 91 people with an average age of 87 who did not have dementia. Researchers took scans of the participants’ brains to measure any plaques in the brain. The amount of stiffness in the participants’ arteries was also measured about two years later.
Half of all participants had beta-amyloid plaques. People with beta-amyloid plaques were more likely to have high systolic blood pressure, higher average blood pressure and higher arterial stiffness as measured with the ankle-brachial method.
Arterial stiffness was highest in people who had both amyloid plaques and white matter hyperintensities in the brain (which may be the scars of lost tissue in the brain).
Each unit of increase in arterial stiffness was associated with a two- to four-fold increase in the odds of having both amyloid plaques and a high amount of brain lesions.
This study adds more evidence that hardening of arteries is associated with dementia and cerebrovascular diseases that do not show symptoms until they get worse.
