HIGH blood pressure can begin to take a toll on memory and thinking skills as early as middle age, new Brazilian research warns.

And you won’t be spared simply by keeping high blood pressure at bay until you hit your golden years, because the study found that even those who hadn’t developed high blood pressure until becoming seniors still experienced a faster decline in thinking skills than those who continued to remain heart-healthy in their golden years.

“As a practical matter, this suggests that we must prevent hypertension at any age in order to avoid its deleterious effect on cognitive [thinking] decline,” said study author Dr. Sandhi Barreto, a professor of medicine at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Whether or not high blood pressure directly triggers mental decline remains an open question, however, given that “proof of causation is very difficult,” said Barreto.

But even if it does, it’s not all bad news, she added, because the results also indicate that thinking skills can be preserved — or at least impairment slowed down — by getting high blood pressure under control through medication and lifestyle changes.

In the study, roughly 7,000 participants were drawn from six Brazilian cities and were about 59, on average, when they first enrolled in the study.

Blood pressure history was noted at the study’s launch. And during two testing periods — 2008/2010 and again in 2012/2014 — participants underwent repeated assessments (for an average of four years) designed to track changes in memory, language skills, concentration, attention, motor speed and mental “flexibility.”

The team ultimately found that middle-aged and senior participants whose top (systolic) blood pressure number and bottom (diastolic) number were deemed “high” experienced some form of accelerated decline in thinking skills, compared with those who maintained normal blood pressure readings. Memory took a clear hit among all those with high blood pressure, whether initially diagnosed before or after the age of 55, as those folks saw their score on all tests of thinking skills collectively start to fall.(SD-Agencies)