Vascular Risk Is Brain Risk. The Research Now Makes This Undeniable.

The same conditions your doctor monitors to protect your heart are now clearly established as major drivers of cognitive decline.

A comprehensive review by Hosoki and colleagues from the University of New South Wales, published in Nature Reviews Neurology in 2023, identified the key processes underlying vascular brain injury: atherosclerosis, arteriolosclerosis, ischaemic injury, endothelial dysfunction, blood-brain barrier breakdown, and neuroinflammation. These are the biological consequences of uncontrolled vascular risk over decades.

A clinical pathological study by Oveisgharan and colleagues from the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center, published in JAMA Neurology in 2022, examined 1,767 participants. Among those with vascular pathology but without significant Alzheimer's disease, over 40% had cognitive impairment. Macroinfarcts in the frontal white matter were the primary driver of faster cognitive decline. Pure vascular cognitive impairment was not rare.

J-MINT trial data from Sakurai and colleagues in 2024 and Sugimoto and colleagues in 2025 consistently showed that multimodal intervention combining exercise, nutritional guidance, vascular risk management, and cognitive training was specifically effective in participants with uncontrolled vascular risk factors, yielding a significant z-score difference of 0.11 (p = 0.032).

If you are managing hypertension, diabetes, or high cholesterol and have not had a cognitive screening, ask your doctor whether ReCOGnAIze is available at your clinic.