High blood pressure during pregnancy can cause dementia later, study

Having pre-eclampsia doubles the risk of vascular dementia. (Source: File Photo)

High blood pressure during pregnancy can be linked to a higher risk of suffering from dementia later in life, a new study has concluded. Published in the journal BMJ and reported in The New York Times, it was deduced that almost five per cent of pregnant women have pre-eclampsia generally after the 20th week. Along with hypertension, it manifests in faltering kidney and liver functions.

In order to arrive at the conclusion, around 1,178,005 Danish women who had given birth from the year 1978 to 2015 were examined. It was seen that more than 58,000 of these women had pre-eclampsia during pregnancy. Suffering from pre-eclampsia increases the risk of vascular dementia by almost double and the risk is even higher for women over the age of 65.

“My advice to a woman who has had pre-eclampsia is the same for dementia as it would be for cardiovascular risk,” Heather A. Boyd, senior author and researcher at the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen said. “Get the hypertension down, get the weight within normal range, work on lowering the risk for Type 2 diabetes. We still need to confirm this finding in other populations, and then we need to figure out what to do about it. We don’t know at this point what the intervention should be,” Boyd added.