A new study suggests that a type of blood vessel damage may be responsible for certain cases of dementia.
Researchers analyzed autopsy data from more than 200 men and women and found one-third of the patients with dementia had damage to the brain's small blood vessels. This type of damage is often caused by high blood pressure or diabetes.
The study was presented by Dr. Thomas Montine of the University of Washington at a Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology meeting in San Diego.
Montine and his team explained that it could be that the damage is caused by a series of strokes so small that they go undetected until the effects accumulate into a condition such as dementia.
More than half of the dementia cases were linked to Alzheimer's and a related disease called Lewy Body Dementia, which do not have known cures or treatments.
However, while more investigation is needed, Montine stressed that controlling diabetes and high blood pressure, two illnesses for which there are treatments, could go a long way to lowering the rates of certain cases of dementia.
This research comes on the heels of a study that concluded that carrying extra weight around the mid-section increases a person's risk of dementia later in life. The risk is greater if a person is also overweight and even greater if a person is obese.
Another recent study suggested that many drugs currently on the market that are meant to slow the progression of dementia in fact have little, if any, effect.
