A heart attack, also known as a myocardial infarction, is a serious health issue. It happens when the blood flow to the heart is suddenly stopped. This makes the heart muscle die from a lack of oxygen.
Every year, about 805,000 people in the U.S. have a heart attack. Most of them are having their first heart attack, but about 200,000 people have already had one before.
Studying Heart Attacks and Brain Health
Recently, a researcher from Johns Hopkins Medicine and other scientists decided to investigate a possible connection between heart attacks and brain health.
They wanted to see if having a heart attack could affect a person’s thinking abilities. They looked at data from adults collected between 1971 and 2019.
In this big group of 30,465 people, 1,033 individuals ended up having at least one heart attack during the study period. Some of them, 137 individuals, even had two heart attacks.
What Did They Find?
The researchers found that having a heart attack did not immediately affect a person’s cognition, or thinking abilities.
However, they noticed that people who had a heart attack started to experience a faster decline in their thinking abilities in the years following the heart attack.
They compared the thinking abilities of people who had a heart attack to those who didn’t, and they found a clear difference.
The drop in thinking abilities after a heart attack was similar to age six to 13 years in terms of cognitive abilities.
What Does This Mean?
Michelle Johansen, the lead researcher of the study, says that these results should be a wake-up call. People should try to control heart-related risk factors like high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
This is because a heart attack could lead to faster brain aging and problems with memory and cognition.
What’s Next?
Johansen explains that the next step is to figure out why heart attacks could lead to faster brain aging. She believes that taking care of your heart can also help you maintain a healthy brain as you get older.
“We’ve shown that preventing heart attacks may help preserve brain health in older adults,” she says. “Now we need to determine what specifically is causing the cognitive decline over time.”
If you care about heart health, please read studies about how eating eggs can help reduce heart disease risk, and herbal supplements could harm your heart rhythm.
For more information about health, please see recent studies about a surprising cause of abnormal heart rhythm, and results showing magnet in common popular devices may harm your heart health.
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