You remember high school, don't you? That feeling of invincibility? That's when you swore that this or that would never happen to you. You wouldn't be the one to get into a motor vehicle collision aka car accident after sneaking a few beers at a party. You wouldn't be the one who got hooked on cigarettes - after all, you were in control and could quit any time, right?
Well, for those of us who've survived into middle age, many still have that same cloak of invisibility. We're not the one who's going to get cancer, have a stroke, become demented, etc. But it turns out that lifestyle, what we're doing now, has a major impact on what's going to happen to us later on in life. Personally, I can still remember some old fogies watching
thirtysomething and thinking to myself that I'll never get old and be like them. So here I am almost 2 decades past that television show's demographic. What happened to the time?
Why the nostalgia & reminiscence? Well, a
cross-sectional cohort study was published early online last Friday in Lancet Neurology in which the
authors concluded that age & blood pressure are directly associated with brain injury & inversely related to brain volume as demonstrated by magnetic resonance imaging, including diffusion tensor imaging. The average age of the 579 participants? 39yo! Brain integrity of someone w/pre-hypertension was calculated as similar to that of someone w/normal blood pressure who was 3.3yrs older while someone w/hypertension had brain integrity similar to that of a normotensive participant 7.2yrs older.
Bottom line: brain injury due to high blood pressure occurs even before the half-century mark. And as I
noted earlier this year, even pre-hypertension increases your risk for badness. Don't wait! Do something about your blood pressure now, whether it's
exercise,
nutrition,
lifestyle (both exercise & nutrition) or medication.
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