Blood-pressure drugs may lower alzheimer's risk

Taking medications to lower blood pressure, particularly diuretics, may help reduce risks for Alzheimer's disease, a new study suggests. Experts speculate that high blood pressure may increase the risk of the brain-wasting disease. That means drugs that ease hypertension -- another name for high blood pressure -- might also lower Alzheimer's risk. In fact, "we found that among people taking anti-hypertensives, there was an overall 40 percent reduction in the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease over a three- to four-year period," said study co-author Peter P. Zandi, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. Drugs that lower blood pressure include diuretics, beta blockers and calcium channel blockers. While diuretics appeared to offer the greatest benefit to study participants, "we also found some evidence that there was a reduced risk with the use of calcium channel blockers," Zandi added. His team published its report in the March 13 online edition of the Archives of Neurology. In their study, Zandi and his colleagues collected data from 1995 to 1998 on nearly 3,300 elderly people living in Cache County, Utah. Among the people in the study, more than 1,500 used blood pressure medications. By 1998, 104 people had developed Alzheimer's disease. The researchers found that people who were taking blood pressure medications at the start of the study were significantly less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease compared with those who were not. The biggest effect was seen with the use of potassium-sparing diuretics -- drugs that contain additional components to maintain blood levels of potassium. These drugs were associated with more than a 70 percent reduction in the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, Zandi's team found. Calcium channel blockers reduced the risk by up to 50 percent, but other blood pressure drugs had little effect on the development of Alzheimer's disease, Zandi read more