A heart attack damages the brain, causing it to fail and age more rapidly

A heart attack damages the brain, causing it to fail and age more rapidly


If you are not attentive enough to cardiovascular prevention, now you have one more reason to deal with high cholesterol, hypertension, overweight, diabetes and the many other enemies of the heart and arteries. In fact, if you can reduce your risk of having a heart attack, your brain will probably thank you. And he will continue to work at his best for a longer time than that of your peer who has instead had to deal with cardiac ischemia.

To tell us how heart and mind are closely connected, even if without finding a certain cause of this relationship between cardiac well-being and brain function, is a research that appears in JAMA Neurology, conducted by experts from the Johns Hopkins University. The study has come to show that in the event of a heart attack, there is a more rapid degeneration of brain activity.

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The results speak for themselves

That heart and brain are closely connected, it must be said, is nothing new. And not just because they share risk factors that somehow endanger the health of both organs.

Just think in this sense of the results of a research that appeared some time ago on JAMA Network Open, conducted by experts from the University of California at Davis. The investigation clearly showed that if there is hypertension already at a young age, around the age of 30, the brain around the age of 70 appears smaller (with reduced dimensions of some cerebral areas) and a more suffering white matter, compared to non hypertensive in youth. These two parameters are associated with cognitive impairment which is also observed in this research.

The scholars examined a large population of people, more than 30,000 monitored in terms of cognitive function in terms of memory, reasoning skills and more, for almost six and a half years on average. In this period 1033 subjects had a heart attack. Those who suffered this heart "accident" had greater declines in overall cognition, memory and executive function over the years of observation than those who did not have the heart attack.

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It is essential to preserve the heart

"Protecting the heart obviously also means protecting the brain." He has no doubts Daniel Tony, director of the Neurovascular Treatment Unit at the Policlinico Umberto I - Sapienza University of Rome. According to the expert, it must be said that there may be several mechanisms which, perhaps by joining together, can explain the data emerging from the American study. "We must always remember that this is an observational study, therefore we can only make hypotheses in this sense - Toni points out. For example, we can think of a cerebral perfusion deficit that occurs after a heart attack, because the heart is less effective in pumping blood towards the brain. Or one can obviously think in terms of sharing of vascular risk factors between the heart and the brain, as happens for example with hypertension or dyslipidemia. It is evident that in those who present alterations of these parameters also the cerebral vascular distress may be accounted for."

The moral, while waiting to understand exactly what happens to the brain after a heart attack, is however simple. Prevention is the most effective weapon we have to reduce cardiovascular risk, obviously together with the speed of assistance in the event of a heart attack or stroke. Let's not forget that.

Heart door

More whole foods and less processed foods, so we lower the risks of heart attack and stroke

by Federico Mereta





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