Objective: To search for a morphologic basis of cognitive impairment possibly associated with arterial hypertension using magnetic resonance imaging and a demanding neuropsychologic test battery.
Design: Case-control comparison with age, length of education, presence of diabetes, and presence of cardiac disease as matching criteria.
Setting: Austrian Stroke Prevention Study.
Subjects: A total of 89 hypertensive subjects and 89 control subjects from a subset of 272 volunteers with no neurologic symptoms undergoing extensive diagnostic workup in a large-scale stroke prevention study among randomly selected elderly community members.
Main outcome measures: Focal brain abnormalities and size of ventricles and cortical sulci as assessed by magnetic resonance imaging and neuropsychological test scores.
Results: Hypertensive subjects more commonly showed areas of white matter hyperintensity and moderately severe ventricular enlargement compared with controls. While no differences were noted between the investigational groups in test results of memory capacity and conceptualization, hypertensive subjects tended to perform worse when assessed for attentional and visuopractical skills. These differences became significant when comparing the brain-damaged subsets of patients and controls with their counterparts without cerebral changes. The pattern and extent of neuropsychologic deficits was similar in hypertensive and normotensive subjects with abnormal magnetic resonance imaging scans.
Conclusion: Our data strongly suggest the high rate of brain abnormalities among hypertensive subjects as the cause of their subtle neuropsychological dysfunction.