13 - Cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and dementia

Summary

This chapter reviews numerous processes involved in the pathogenesis of heart disease and subsequent neurological damage. It focuses on clinically prevalent cardiac disease, including atrial fibrillation, myocardial infarction, coronary artery disease, heart failure, coronary artery bypass grafting, and cardiac arrest. The chapter also focuses on the risk that clinical heart disease confers for cognitive decline and dementia, in general, and vascular dementia (VaD), in particular. In an effort to understand the relations between vascular disease and dementia, it discusses shared environmental and genetic risk factors and evidence for common underlying mechanisms of these clinical cardiovascular diseases. Understanding the complex relations between cardiac integrity and brain function requires a number of future research directions, including the diversity of samples investigated, methodological considerations, prevention advances, and genetic discoveries. One major need is to expand the racial and ethnic populations of interest and increase the diversity of samples studied.