Association between the incident hypertension duration and cognitive performance in older adults: data from the NHANES 2011–2014

Background

Established evidences have demonstrated that hypertension was associated with the cognitive impairment. But the associations between the duration of hypertension exposure and cognitive performance are still inconclusive.

Objectives

The objective of this study was to assess the association between the duration of hypertension diagnosis and cognitive performance in older adults by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2011–2014).

Methods

To evaluate the relationship between the hypertension duration and cognitive performance, we conducted the logistic regression analysis. Furthermore, we also performed the Restricted cubic spline (RCS) analysis to assess the nonlinear relationship between the duration of exposure to hypertension and cognitive performance.

Results

Initially, total 19,931 participants were included in this study, and 2928 individuals were enrolled. With the increase of hypertension duration, more risk of cognitive impairment was observed in the Digit Symbol Substitution test (DSST) (OR = 1.012, 1.006–1.019), and a similar trend was observed in Animal Fluency test (AFT) (OR = 1.009,1.003–1.016). The RCS results showed that the hypertension duration pattern was linear associated with the risk of cognitive impairment in DDST (P for non–linearity = 0.758). Meanwhile, subgroups analysis of midlife hypertension, we revealed that linear association with the risk of cognitive impairment in DSST (P for non–linearity = 0.391) and CERAD (P for non–linearity = 0.849) among hypertension diagnose < 55 years populations.

Conclusion

Collectively, our finding indicates that longer duration of exposure to hypertension worsens the cognition performance, especially for middle-aged hypertension.