A new article says that before blood pressure increased, hypertension was already damaging blood vessels and brain matter.
How is that possible? It won’t matter, if history is any indication, career bureaucrats at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are already scheduling a briefing before Congress to ask for more money to prevent this new pandemic.
Like they did with prediabetes, where the United States was the only one to declare that a blood A1c level so low that only 5% of people with it would develop type 2 diabetes in their lives was a pandemic they needed funds to stop. A blood level so low that half of China would be prediabetic if the CDC were in charge. Pharmaceutical companies would love to have 700,000,000 people designated as customers, but every other country continues to shake its head at our belief system, just as tourists are baffled by the 80,000 Proposition 65 “can cause cancer” stickers on every store in California.
You don’t need science, science can even be the enemy; you just need epidemiology. And perhaps the belief in homeopathic effects. However, because the CDC stated it, anyone with that A1c can get Wegovy or one of the other, real diabetes medications, covered by insurance that we all pay for.
The new paper does what all correlations do; Tell us how worrying the effects are. In this case, if you have high blood pressure, you are 1.5 times more likely to also develop cognitive disorders. There are real headaches in such statements. Since the 1970s, well-funded medical organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Heart Association have hijacked an alarming amount of American government medical policy. What used to be high blood pressure 50 years ago is now 40 points lower when it comes to systolic pressure (force during heartbeats) and the diastolic standard for “high” has also been greatly reduced. As with air quality and chemicals, we maintain panic by reducing risk, even if there are no improvements in outcomes.
Those changes in “high” blood pressure mean that many more people, tens of millions more, take medications. That led to a corresponding drop in cognitive disorders… oh wait, no, it didn’t.
That’s where the magic comes in (call it homeopathic or integrated medicine beliefs if you want). There has been no reduction in cognitive disorders, losartan and the rest have no effect on brain function. Therefore, the authors claim that blood pressure causes damage to blood vessels before high blood pressure occurs. It could also be called Prehypertension.
Is left over? It is due to the collapse of public trust in science and epidemiology’s cousin, mouse studies. This is only EXPLORATORY because it only occurs in mice. Rodents are not little people, despite what activists who want to ban chemicals “at the drop of a hat” insist needs to happen.
Instead, the authors created a mouse version of hypertension with the hormone angiotensin and suggest it is a substitute for humans, although everyone knows it is not. After increasing blood pressure in mice, they looked at brain cells and found that the lining of blood cells appeared “older,” neurons appeared damaged, and the blood-brain barrier appeared less effective. They claimed that oligodendrocytes did not express genes as well as they did.
Left: cerebral cortex of mice without hypertension. The yellow ones are normal endothelial cells, the blue ones are senescence: they have stopped functioning correctly. Middle: After angiotensin is administered to cause hypertension, more blue cells “die.” Right: Angiotensin receptor blockade improved endothelial cells. Credit: Dr. Anthony Pacholko
They point out that losartan inhibits the angiotensin receptor, but that is the problem with the correlation that lacks a plausible biological mechanism. If an angiotensin II type 1 (AT1) receptor antagonist had more than a slight correlation with cognitive decline, there would be a notable difference after 30 years and 100,000,000 people. However, there is not.
Citation: Schaeffer, Samantha M., Pacholko, Anthony G., Santisteban, Monica M., Ahn, Sung Ji, Racchumi, Gianfranco, Wang, Gang, Park, Laibaik, Faraco, Giuseppe, Anrather, Josef,
Iadecola, Costantino, Hypertension-induced neurovascular and cognitive dysfunction at single-cell resolution, Neuron 0896-6273 doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2025.10.018
#prediabetes #CDC #call #prehypertension #pandemic
