Aim: The purpose of this study was to determine whether arterial stiffness can be used to predict one-year changes in the cognitive function in Japanese community-dwelling elderly subjects.
Methods: A total of 103 Japanese community-dwelling elderly patients joined this study. Information regarding the age, height, weight, gender and past medical history of each participant was obtained. Additionally, arterial stiffness was determined according to the cardio-ankle vascular index (CAVI), and the cognitive function was assessed with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). One year later, we performed the MMSE in the same subjects. After dividing the cohort according to the 80th percentile of the CAVI (normal and arterial stiffness [AS] groups), we examined whether the degree of cognitive decline, as determined using the pre- and post-MMSE, was significantly different based on the severity of arterial stiffness, adjusted for age, BMI, gender and the pre-MMSE scores.
Results: Of the 103 subjects who participated in the pre-data collection, 74 (38 men and 36 women, 73.4±4.0 years) joined the post-data collection. We found a significant difference in the change in the post-MMSE scores between the normal and AS groups (pre-MMSE: normal group [27.4±2.1] and AS group [26.9±2.4] and post-MMSE: normal group [27.2±2.1] and AS group [25.5±2.3], F=5.95, p=0.02). For each domain of the MMSE, the changes in MMSE-attention-and-calculation (F=5.11, p=0.03) and MMSE-language (F=4.32, p=0.04) were significantly different according to an ANCOVA.
Conclusions: We found that arterial stiffness predicts cognitive decline in Japanese community-dwelling elderly subjects regardless of the initial level of the global cognitive function. This finding indicates the potential use of the degree of arterial stiffness as an indicator for preventing or delaying the onset of dementia in the elderly.