(Press-News.org) In six massive laboratory freezers at the University of Utah, nearly 40,000 blood samples wait in frozen stasis.
They represent four years of data from one of the largest studies of hypertension in the U.S.: an intensive blood pressure intervention study called the SPRINT trial. And hidden in many of these blood samples are subtle chemical signals that point to their donors’ current and future brain health conditions—among them Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, the most common cause of disability among adults over 65.
Now, powered by a $25.7M, five-year National Institutes of Health grant, researchers are poised to unlock this informational treasure trove and uncover the connections between hypertension, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia.
Linking blood pressure to brain health
High blood pressure is one of the biggest modifiable risk factors for dementia—progressive problems with memory and thinking that interfere with daily life. The most common kind of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease, caused by protein buildup in the brain, but dementia can also be caused by problems with the blood vessels in the brain. It’s unknown exactly how high blood pressure harms the brain, or how blood pressure management strategies might help.
The project will analyze the vault of blood samples for molecules that specifically herald either Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of cognitive decline. The project is funded by the National Institute on Aging, a division of the National Institutes of Health. Adam Bress, PharmD, professor of population health sciences at University of Utah Health, investigator at the VA Salt Lake City Healthcare System, and a principal investigator on the study, explains that the project aims to answer a few big questions:
"How does lowering blood pressure more intensively affect brain health?
Does [hypertension treatment] affect brain health through pathways around Alzheimer’s disease—protein plaques and tangles—or is it through the blood vessels themselves?
How does having Alzheimer’s pathology in your brain impact how we treat your high blood pressure?"
New technology to find new connections
Key to answering these questions will be the researchers’ use of a new technology: a recently discovered blood biomarker that diagnoses Alzheimer’s-related brain changes nearly as well as the gold standards of a brain PET scan or cerebrospinal fluid sample.
The blood biomarkers will be cross-referenced with comprehensive health information to determine how the effectiveness of blood pressure treatment can change based on genetics, demographics, and existing health conditions. For instance, the study aims to find out whether intensive hypertension treatments still reduce dementia risk for people with genetic susceptibilities to dementia. Answering these questions will help doctors provide targeted interventions to help each patient.
Rachel Hess, MD, associate vice president for research at U of U Health, emphasizes the value of the unique U of U-based biobank that makes this study possible. “The University of Utah is proud to be the home for the SPRINT biospecimens, which are a legacy of all of the SPRINT participants and researchers across the country,” Hess says. “This biobank lets us query samples that could be over a decade old and answer new questions with new biomarkers to gain novel insights into how hypertension control can change the course of aging for millions of Americans.”
Helping patients and driving science forward
Jeremy Pruzin, MD, behavioral neurologist at Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix and a principal investigator on the funded study, says, “We hope that the results of the study will help people by contributing to our understanding of how and in whom hypertension confers the highest risk for dementia, guiding more individualized treatment for hypertension, and ultimately lowering dementia risk in those individuals using medicines for blood pressure.”
Bress adds, “The other thing that's crucial about this grant, which is probably one of the biggest things, is we're going to post all the data publicly.” Data on five different blood biomarkers will be matched with clinical cognitive outcomes and dementia diagnoses—a detailed resource to power future studies. “This is going to be one of the largest repositories of its kind in the world.”
Jasmeer Chhatwal, MD, PhD, behavioral neurologist at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator on the study, says, “The advent of blood-based biomarkers for neurodegenerative disease will change the landscape for screening, diagnosis, and treating cognitive impairments in older adults. The results from this study will be crucial to understanding how we might implement these new tools in a ‘real world’ population.”
“This innovative research uses novel-blood based biomarkers and clinical trial data to decode dementia pathology and, in doing so, will provide answers about how blood pressure affects brain health and how we can best treat people living with both Alzheimer’s Disease and hypertension. Ultimately, this work can help protect people’s memory, independence, and well-being,” says Angela Fagerlin, PhD, chair of population health sciences at U of U Health.
###
This work will be funded by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (grant number 1R01AG096179-01). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
This project was made possible by a strategic investment from the office of the associate vice president for research, the Departments of Population Health Sciences and Internal Medicine at University of Utah Health, and the Utah Diabetes and Metabolism Research Center (UDMRC) office. Other researchers who contributed to the success of the grant include Angela Fagerlin, Scott Summers, John Inadomi, Rachel Hess, Alfred Cheung, Tom Greene, and Yizhe Xu.
END
$25.7M grant powers research to understand link between high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia
2025-09-24
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Caring for a baby makes the world seem more dangerous
2025-09-24
ITHACA, N.Y. — In a potentially threatening situation, the world looks more dangerous when caring for a baby, finds first-of-its-kind Cornell University psychology research using virtual environments to explore parenting dynamics.
When playing an online game that placed an adult on the side of a road after running out of gas, both parents and nonparents were quicker to detect oncoming traffic—and rated cars as moving faster—when they had to keep a virtual baby out of harm’s way. Reactions were quicker ...
An eco-friendly way to see in the dark
2025-09-24
Manufacturers of infrared cameras face a growing problem: the toxic heavy metals in today's infrared detectors are increasingly banned under environmental regulations, forcing companies to choose between performance and compliance.
This regulatory pressure is slowing the broader adoption of infrared detectors across civilian applications, just as demand in fields like autonomous vehicles, medical imaging and national security is accelerating.
In a paper published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, researchers at NYU Tandon School ...
This breakthrough tool could detect early signs of Alzheimer’s
2025-09-24
NAU researchers are experimenting with new technology that could help medical providers easily detect Alzheimer’s disease early and prevent its advance.
Led by Travis Gibbons, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and fueled in part by a grant from the Arizona Alzheimer’s Association, the research project centers on the brain’s metabolism—specifically, how it uses glucose, the sugar that fuels our thoughts, movements and emotions.
“The brain is like a muscle,” ...
Raising money for a charity? Don't bark up the wrong tree.
2025-09-24
Dog owners are often associated with personality traits of being social and community-oriented while "cat people" are often thought of as introverted and more open-minded, according to prior research.
But if you're about to raise money for a charity from people with pets, you may want to think about the strategy.
A new Dartmouth study finds that cat owners donate slightly more than dog owners, and also donate more often and more diversely. However, people without pets donate the most.
The findings are published in the journal Anthrozoӧs.
To examine philanthropic ...
Shining a light on dark valleytronics
2025-09-24
In a world-first, researchers from the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have directly observed the evolution of the elusive dark excitons in atomically thin materials, laying the foundation for new breakthroughs in both classical and quantum information technologies. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications. Professor Keshav Dani, head of the unit, highlights the significance: "Dark excitons have great potential as information carriers, because they are inherently less likely to interact with light, and hence less prone to degradation of their quantum properties. ...
Arts programs can help prevent heart disease, diabetes, and other leading causes of deaths, large study finds
2025-09-24
Art isn’t just for stages and studios. It can be a powerful public health resource.
That’s the takeaway from a new international study, commissioned by the Jameel Arts and Health Lab, which examined nearly 100 research projects from 27 countries to consider how arts programs, such as music, dance, theater, storytelling and other creative and cultural activities, can help prevent some of the world’s biggest killers: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other non-communicable diseases, which account ...
New study finds dried blood spot test reliably detects congenital CMV at birth
2025-09-24
MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (09/24/2025) — New research from the University of Minnesota Medical School confirms that testing for congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) at birth using the routinely collected dried blood spot (DBS) is a reliable and effective method to identify newborns at risk for long-term developmental challenges. The findings were recently published in JAMA Network Open.
Congenital CMV is a virus passed to infants in the womb and occurs in about 1 in 200 infants. About 20% of babies with cCMV infection have birth defects or other long-term health problems.
The findings demonstrate that the PCR-based test performed on dried blood ...
Landmark discovery reveals how chromosomes are passed from one generation to the next
2025-09-24
When a woman becomes pregnant, the outcome of that pregnancy depends on many things — including a crucial event that happened while she was still growing inside her own mother’s womb. It depends on the quality of the egg cells that were already forming inside her fetal ovaries. The DNA-containing chromosomes in those cells must be cut, spliced and sorted perfectly. In males, the same process produces sperm in the testes but occurs only after puberty.
“If that goes wrong, then you end up with the wrong number of chromosomes in the eggs or sperm,” said Neil Hunter, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of ...
Milk matters: How donor human milk storage affects preemie gut health
2025-09-24
A study from the Medical University of South Carolina, published in the Journal of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition, reveals that shorter storage durations of donor human milk are linked to reduced gastrointestinal complicatoins in premature infants, including necrotizing enterocolitis. These findings suggestt that minimizing milk storage time may help to preserve protective properties crucial for preterm gut health, offering new insights into neonatal nutrition practices and improving outcomes for vulnerable ...
Study finds most cancer patients exposed to misinformation. Researchers pilot 'information prescription.'
2025-09-24
Ninety-three percent of patients with a new cancer diagnosis were exposed to at least one type of misinformation about cancer treatments, a UF Health Cancer Center study has found.
Most patients encountered the misinformation — defined as unproven or disproven cancer treatments and myths or misconceptions — even when they weren’t looking for it.
The findings have major implications for cancer treatment decision-making. Specifically, doctors should assume the patient has seen or heard misinformation.
“Clinicians should assume when their patients are coming to them for a treatment discussion that they have been exposed ...