Heart disease might contribute to the sort of brain shrinkage seen in dementia, a new study says.
People with early signs of heart problems are more likely to have brain changes associated with dementia, researchers reported on March 26 in the journal Neurology.
Specifically, people whose hearts aren’t pumping blood efficiently are more likely to have smaller brain volumes than people with healthy hearts, researchers found.
The study “shows that even mild … dysfunction is associated with adverse brain health,” senior researcher Dr. Frank Wolters, a senior scientist with Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, said in a news release.
“Evaluating people who have heart problems … for problems with memory and thinking skills could help us detect any cognitive decline early and start interventions,” Wolters added.
For the study, researchers pooled data from seven studies in Europe and the U.S. which measured people’s heart function and scanned their brains using MRI. In all, the studies included nearly 11,000 people.
Results showed that people with moderate to severe systolic dysfunction — where the heart can’t contract normally and pump efficiently — tended to have smaller total brain volumes than those with healthy hearts.
In addition, people with diastolic dysfunction — where the heart doesn’t properly relax and fill with blood between heartbeats — had smaller brain volumes, especially in the hippocampus, the brain region that plays an important role in memory.
Even heart symptoms that don’t amount to full-blown heart failure were linked to smaller brain volumes, researchers said.
Shrinking brain volumes have been linked to mild cognitive impairment and dementia, researchers noted.
“This review shows that better heart health is associated with larger brain volumes, suggesting that the preservation of heart function could help maintain brain health and memory and thinking skills during the aging process,” Wolters said.
However, he added that additional studies are needed to further investigate why heart problems might affect brain health.