Heart Disease Bad for Brain

July 22, 2008 -- Heart disease may be linked to poorer mental performance -- even in middle age, long before dementia sets in, a new study shows.

The study included some 10,300 middle-aged British government workers in London. They were followed from the mid-1980s through 2004.

Participants got checkups and answered questions about their health and lifestyle periodically throughout the study. At the end of the study, they took tests of mental skills including reasoning, vocabulary, short-term memory, and verbal fluency (in which they had one minute to name as many words beginning with "s" or as many animals as possible).

The researchers, who included Archana Singh-Manoux, PhD, of France's Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM), looked for differences in the test scores of people with and without a history of heart disease.

Participants with a history of heart disease had lower test scores than those with healthy hearts, regardless of age, sex, years of education, and use of cardiovascular drugs.

The study doesn't show why that is, and it doesn't prove that heart disease hampered mental skills.

But the researchers note that the heart and the brain can both suffer from smoking, unhealthy diets, and inactive lifestyles -- and that healthy habits might help keep the mind sharp and the heart healthy.

The study has some limits. For instance, participants didn't take the mental skills tests at the study's start for before-and-after comparisons.

Singh-Manoux and colleagues report their findings online in the European Heart Journal.