Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

High blood pressure, or hypertension (HTN), is a highly-prevalent health condition and affects nearly half of all older adults in Canada. If left untreated or uncontrolled, HTN may lead to more serious conditions such as heart disease, stroke, or heart attack. A growing body of evidence also implicates HTN in aging-related declines in cognitive functioning; that is, older adults with high blood pressure are at increased risk for earlier or more dramatic changes in cognitive functioning than their non-diagnosed peers. The majority of work in this area has been at the macro-level, comparing groups of people with normal and with high blood pressure, to study changes in cognition over many years. However, previous studies have shown that blood pressure is reactive to daily events and experiences, such as negative emotions and stress, which have themselves been demonstrated to impact an individual’s cognitive functioning. . The purpose of this project is to examine the association between blood pressure and cognition at the daily level and evaluate determinants and modifiers of this association. In this study, we ask older adult participants to monitor their morning and evening blood pressure levels every day for two weeks and to complete a survey each evening. The survey asks about personality traits and daily events such as stress, physical activity and mood. Finally, participants complete four cognitive tasks each day to assess their memory, reasoning and perceptual speed. This approach allows us to study the short-term coupling relationship between blood pressure and cognition, and also focuses on the individual. Rather than comparing a participant to the larger population, we compare them to themselves. This makes it possible to answer the question ‘On a day when your blood pressure was above your usual level, was your cognitive functioning below your normal level?’ This important issue has only been studied once before. Their findings showed that older adults with HTN tended to show cognitive deficits on days when their blood pressure was above their usual level. To more fully understand the short-term link between blood pressure and cognition, replication studies are needed to examine if these findings hold with a different sample in another geographic location. Our project follows the same approach as the past work and serves as a replication. It is also an expansion, with the inclusion of survey questions on daily events and experiences. With this additional information, we will be able to link stress, mood and other factors to the association between blood pressure and cognition and will examine whether the association is stronger for individuals with higher average blood pressure. For example, it may be that daily stressors affect cognition by raising blood pressure. If this is found to be the case, an effective stress management intervention may be helpful to minimize both immediate and cumulative negative consequences on high blood pressure and cognitive functioning. This project will help elucidate the mechanism behind the blood pressure-cognition link and is currently ongoing to recruit additional volunteer participants. Given the high lifetime risk of developing HTN and its high prevalence in the older adult population, it is imperative that we further our understanding of the role it may play in age-related cognitive decline. Doing so will help our aging population stay healthy for longer and optimize their independence, well-being and quality of life.