A new study has provided genetic evidence linking a common condition of blood vessels in the brain to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Known as white matter hyperintensity (WMH), the condition is marked by lesions in the brain, a common feature of cerebral small vessel disease in which blood vessels become narrowed, restricting blood flow, potentially resulting in a stroke.
By damaging blood vessels, cerebral small vessel disease is believed to be a major cause of cognitive decline and dementia, in which a person’s memory and thinking abilities are affected, impacting daily activities and life. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia.
According to the study authors, led by researchers from the University of Texas in the US, there is limited “causal evidence” that WMH lesions cause stroke and dementia. However, previous studies have found that these lesions, which appear as bright areas in MRI brain scans, increase the risk of such neurologically impairing conditions.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open, showed that genetic evidence of blood vessel-related (vascular) damage in the brain may lead to dementia.
The researchers first estimated a person’s genetic risk of developing WMH, stroke and blood pressure. In a second step, they compared these risks to those of people who actually developed dementia, for which data were drawn from population-level studies published between 1979 and 2018. The two-year analysis included up to 75,000 dementia cases of European descent.
“Since vascular disease is a treatable contributor to dementia risk, our findings have broad significance for prevention strategies for Alzheimer’s and dementia overall,” said first author Muralidharan Sargurupremaraj, assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center.
About 75 million people worldwide are expected to develop dementia by 2030, and developing strategies to prevent or delay it is a major public health priority, the researchers said.
The authors said future studies could explore whether their findings could be applied more broadly to non-European populations.
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