UMaine Psychology Research Relates Stiff Arteries to Cognitive Decline
Contact: Professor Merrill Elias, 581-2097; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO, Maine — A team of University of Maine psychology and epidemiology researchers and Australian colleagues reported in a recent issue of the medical journal “Hypertension” that arterial stiffness related to high blood pressure and advancing age are associated with performance deficits in multiple cognitive abilities.
“Hypertension” is a peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the American Heart Association.
Using a new and sophisticated blood pressure monitoring method that measures “aortic pulse wave velocity” — the speed of arterial blood pressure waveform as it leaves and returns to the heart from the periphery of the circulatory system — researchers found the combination of higher pulse wave velocity associated with high blood pressure and age resulted in increasingly poor cognitive performance. The poorest cognitive performance was seen in older adults with high pulse wave velocity.
The findings, initially controlled for age, education, gender and race, were replicated in an expanded model, which additionally adjusted for a variety of cardiovascular risk factors and excluded persons with a history of stroke and dementia.
While there is other evidence that stiff arteries are bad for cognition, pulse wave velocity measurements are considered the gold standard for indirect, non-invasive measurement of stiffening of arteries throughout the cardiovascular system, including the brain, according to UMaine psychology professor Merrill F. “Pete” Elias, principal investigator for the research and senior author of “Arterial Pulse Wave Velocity and Cognition with Advancing Age.”
Co-authors included UMaine professors of psychology Michael Robbins and Penelope Elias, and graduate student Greg Dore, with Marc Budge and Walter Abhayaratna, experts in pulse wave velocity measurement from the College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, Australian National University Medical School.
Arterial stiffness, commonly known as hardening of the arteries, can set the stage for stroke and a variety of cardiovascular diseases, in addition to vascular cognitive impairment and vascular dementia. Previous research shows that delaying the progression of arterial stiffness through exercise and diet is “very possibly” one way to prevent dementias related to stokes, mini-stokes, and other disorders of the arterial system in the heart, brain and kidneys, according to Merrill Elias.
The extensive neuropsychological testing and pulse wave velocity measurements were done as part of the ongoing Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study, begun by Elias and D.H.P. Streeten, M.D., distinguished blood pressure researcher and professor of medicine at State University of New York, Syracuse, when Elias was an associate professor of psychology at Syracuse University in 1974.
In the study, which moved to the University of Maine in 1976, an estimated 2,400 participants are followed across the United States, including Maine and Syracuse, N.Y., for medical diagnostic and neuropsychological examinations in three- to five-year intervals, according to Elias.
One of the longest running research projects at the University of Maine, the 33-year study recently received $636,836 in new funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, for an additional year of work on the pulse wave velocity component of the study.
Renewed funding for the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study will enable Elias, Robbins and colleagues to generate new research on relationships between cognitive function and such health risks as diabetes, obesity, cholesterol, high and low blood pressure, renal disease, nutritional deficiencies and genetics.
“After examining many risk factors for cardiovascular disease in relation to mental performance, we have now been able to examine the relation between arterial stiffness and cognitive functioning with advancing age,” Elias says. Using PWV in the testing makes the results much more accurate than previously was possible, Elias says.
“These findings are important to this emerging area of research because we examined people from a broad range of populations, from 24 to 92, and used an extremely extensive battery of cognitive testing,” he says.
Use of pulse wave velocity measurement may, with eventual reductions in cost, become a routine part of physical exams in the doctor’s office, yielding more precise detection of cardiovascular risks associated with hypertension. It also may lead to better evaluation of the success achieved with specific antihypertensive drugs, Elias says.
The article appeared in the online version of Hypertension on Feb. 23 and April 1, 2009.