Heart Attack Linked With Cognitive Decline Over Time

New research shows persons who had a heart attack experienced a considerably faster deterioration in cognition in the years following the heart attack than those who did not.

The researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine, US, determined whether people who have had heart attacks showed cognitive changes compared to people who were similar to them in all respects except they had not had a heart attack in a combined analysis of six different large studies of adults conducted between 1971 and 2019.

The findings of the study have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Neurology.

An associate professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Michelle Johansen said, “Due to the fact that many people are at risk for having a heart attack, we hope that the results of our study will serve as a wake-up call for people to control vascular risk factors like high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol as soon as they can since we have shown that having a heart attack increases your risk of decreased cognition and memory later on in life”.

A heart attack, also known as a myocardial infarction, is a medical emergency in which the heart’s blood supply is suddenly and severely diminished or cut off, causing the muscle to die from a lack of oxygen.

While the researchers did not uncover substantial deterioration in those who had their first heart attack, the participants’ cognitive assessments showed a decline in the years after the event.

At the time of the initial cognitive examination, the study sample of 30,465 people had not had a heart attack or stroke and did not have dementia. 1,033 of these people experienced at least one heart attack, while 137 had two heart attacks.

The whole sample included 29 percent of Black people, 8 percent were Hispanic, and 56 percent were women. People who had heart attacks were more likely to be older and male.

The researchers assessed multiple facets of participants’ cognition using a variety of cognitive tests, which were then integrated to reflect one cognitive domain. A loss of points showed a decline in that cognitive domain.

The many components of participants’ cognition that were measured included their global or overall cognition over time, including memory and executive functioning, or the ability to make difficult cognitive decisions.

According to Johansen, the next steps would be to investigate other components of heart function and how these can affect brain health.

Johansen further said, “We have shown that preventing heart attacks may be one strategy to preserve brain health in older adults”.

“Now we need to determine what specifically is causing the cognitive decline over time”, Johansen added.

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