Prevalence of cognitive impairments in elderly patients with arterial hypertension

The evolution of cognitive impairment of vascular origin is becoming an increasingly prominent health threat, especially in this era when hypertension is a leading contributor to the global burden of disease and overall health loss. Hypertension is associated with altered cerebral microcirculation coupled with adverse vascular remodeling, with subsequent slowing of mental processing speed, reduced abstract thinking, loss of language abilities, and deficits in attention and memory. Due to the rapidly increasing burden of hypertension in Kyrgyzstan, we assessed the prevalence and correlates of cognitive impairment among hypertensive patients admitted to the Bishkek Clinical Multidisciplinary Hospital No. 1. The present study highlights that cognitive decline is significantly prevalent among individuals with systemic hypertension. More than two-fifths of the hypertensive participants in this present study had cognitive impairment. There is a wide variability in the prevalence of cognitive impairment (16.5–63.9%) among hypertensive individuals in the literature, but our rate is in the middle. This discrepancy in prevalence may result from differences in population characteristics and variability in the instruments used to assess cognitive function across studies. It is therefore imperative to include cognitive assessment in the routine evaluation of hypertensive patients