Children with hypertension have trouble with thinki...(ypertension did Lande said. With furth...),Health

Lande said preliminary results suggest that treatment of hypertension in children may improve their cognitive executive functions, indicating that the changes in cognition associated with hypertension may be reversible with treatment to normalize the blood pressure. .

Lande was inspired to conduct the study after finding a correlation between high blood pressure and lower scores on neurocognitive tests in a nationally representative dataset, NHANES III, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted from 1988 to 1994. To dig deeper, Lande enrolled 32 newly diagnosed hypertensive children and adolescents (10 to 18 years old) from the Pediatric Hypertension Clinic at the University's Golisano Children's Hospital. Children who didn't have sustained hypertension or had previous medical issues that affected learning or sleeping were excluded. Thirty-two children with normal blood pressure were recruited from the hospital's pediatric practice and other area pediatric practices and were matched with the hypertensive children by age, weight, sex, race IQ and socioeconomic level.

The parents of both sets of 32 children answered a series of surveys to determine their children's executive function. (Testing the children through parental assessments can be a more valid test because these assessments evaluate the child's abilities in real-life situations better than directly testing a child, one-on-one in a lab setting) Although the hypertensive group did not perform poorly enough to require clinical intervention, the results were significantly different than the group without hypertension.

"We don't know the long-term implications of these subtle changes, but the potential for these differences in cognitive function to affect children is certainly concerning
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