The new study, published Monday (July 6) in The Journal of Neuroscience, did not prove that the heart issues directly caused memory problems. But it "adds to the overall picture that preserving healthy brain-heart communication is key for healthy aging," said Dr. Jan Scheitz, a consultant stroke neurologist and head of the Brain-Heart Lab at the Charité University Hospital in Germany, who was not involved in the study.
The work could one day help doctors identify patients at risk of memory problems early on through routine heart-function tests, said study co-author Dr. Xia Zhang, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany.
Early warning signs
Researchers already knew that heart and brain function are closely interconnected. Heart diseases such as heart failure, atrial fibrillation and heart attack impair communication between the heart and the brain. This can contribute to thinking problems and dementia by restricting blood flow to the brain and causing chronic inflammation.
In the new study, researchers followed 73 patients who had sought care for heart-related symptoms at the Heart Center Leipzig in Germany, some of whom had confirmed coronary artery disease and/or heart failure. They also assessed 95 people without any heart-related symptoms. The researchers measured heart function at the start of the study. Then, about 3.5 years later, they performed cognitive testing and an MRI scan of the brain to take a snapshot of its structure.
The cognitive tests were given only to the heart-disease patients, and they assessed attention, executive function, learning and memory. Only memory showed a link to weaker heart pumping. The participants with weaker heart pumping showed more microscopic damage in memory-related brain regions, and those brain changes correlated with worse memory scores.
"What surprised us most" was that subtle reductions in the heart's ability to pump were tied to later brain changes, even in patients who did not meet clinical criteria for heart failure, Zhang said.
"The next step for the field is replication in larger cohorts with multiple time points, so that cardiac function, brain microstructure, and cognition can be followed more precisely over time," she said.
Related storiesThe brain damage flagged in the 73 patients happened in parts of the brain that are important for memory and are vulnerable in Alzheimer's disease. "These regions helped identify a possible brain pathway through which poorer cardiac function may contribute to later memory problems," Zhang said.
The study also did not directly test the effect of exercise on heart and brain health, but the findings may help explain why regular exercise is often linked to better brain health and cognitive aging, Zhang said.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
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