Hypertension and the rate of cognitive decline in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Hypertension has been suspected of being associated with Alzheimer disease (AD). To study this problem, a case-control study investigating the association between hypertension and cognitive decline was conducted as a secondary analysis of data from more than 700 patients diagnosed with AD who had been randomly assigned to the placebo arm of a clinical trial. Additional analyses were undertaken to investigate the effects of baseline disease severity, age, gender, apolipoprotein genotype, and the use of antihypertensive medication in this population.