- Researchers have found that high blood pressure in midlife puts women at disproportionate risk of a condition called vascular dementia.
- They say this could be due to disparities in treatment between men and women, or biological differences between the sexes.
- Experts say blood pressure typically increases with age.
In a new study published this month from the George Institute for Global Health, researchers have found that high blood pressure in midlife puts women at disproportionate risk of a condition called vascular dementia.
While a link between midlife cardiovascular events and dementia was similar for both men and women, the results were not the same for blood pressure.
“We conducted this study to examine whether there were any differences between women and men in the association of major cardiovascular risk factors for incident all-cause dementia,” lead author Jessica Gong, a PhD candidate at the George Institute for Global Health, told Healthline. “Before our study, it was not clear whether the risk factors for dementia affect women and men differently.”
To discover sex differences in cardiovascular risk factors for dementia, researchers analyzed data from the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database that recruited 502,489 Britons ages 40 to 69, who were free from dementia at study start, between 2006 and 2010.
Source: healthline