Lowering blood pressure aggressively for four years reduced new dementia diagnoses by 15 percent over seven years, according to results from a 33,995-person trial presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich.
Dementia prevention has been one of the hardest things in medicine to prove. Researchers can show that high blood pressure is associated with later cognitive decline, but demonstrating that treating it actually prevents dementia requires enormous trials running for many years, and most attempts have fallen short of statistical significance.
