According to the new research small blood vessel damage due to High blood-pressure and diabetes may be among the major causes of dementia.

The discoveries give an additional reason to control these general conditions as stated Dr. Thomas Montine of the University of Washington, who presented the study on Sunday at Experimental Biology 2008 in San Diego.
The autopsied brains of every third men and women with dementia or cognitive deterioration prove small vessel damage — a growing injury that can occur to multiple small strokes owing to Blood-pressure and diabetes. According to the researchers these strokes are so minute that the person can’t even notice them until the collective results that prove very harmful.

In the meantime, almost 45 percent of the risk for dementia has been linked with pathologic changes of Alzheimer’s disease. Another 10 percent risk has been associated to Lewy bodies that are structural changes in brain’s region that show a degenerative brain disease identified as Lewy Body Dementia, a probable deviation of Alzheimer’s and/or Parkinson’s disease, the study suggests.

The discovery about small vessel disease defies conservative understanding and conclusions from most autopsy studies of brain aging and dementia, Montine states.

The large population sample on which the autopsy study has been based may be reason for the contrary results, he further narrates. Most previous research had been focused on participant in Alzheimer’s disease center studies, or was limited to one gender, cultural or professional group while the individuals in that new study were part of a large manage care program and representative of the Seattle urban and suburban area and most were white, Asian, African-American and Hispanic, with a range of educational and professional levels. In the study, which continued from 1994 to 2006, some participants had cognitive harm and dementia, while others did not. Approximately a third of all 3,400 participants died, and autopsies were carried out on 221 who had given permission for this to be done.

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