MiscellaneousRelation of Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction to Cognitive Aging (from the Framingham Heart Study)
Section snippets
Methods
The Framingham Offspring Study design and selection criteria have been described elsewhere.10 From 1971 to 1975, 5,124 participants were recruited and have been examined every 4 to 8 years since. Details on the derivation of the current sample are provided in Figure 1. The protocol was approved by the local institutional review board. Participants provided written informed consent before assessments.
Participants completed the following cognitive protocol, which was selected a priori to
Results
Clinical characteristics are listed in Table 1. Cardiac MRI, brain MRI, and neuropsychological descriptive variables are listed in Table 2. As a continuous variable, the LVEF was unrelated to any brain MRI or neuropsychological variable (Table 3). Findings were not altered when participants with CVD were excluded (Table 4).
When LVEF quintiles were compared to assess associations with brain aging variables, participants in quintile 1 did not differ from the referent group (quintiles 2 to 4) for
Discussion
Our epidemiologic findings suggest a U-shaped association, rather than a linear relation, between LVEF and markers of abnormal brain aging. Participants in the lowest and highest LVEF quintiles had cross-sectional evidence of abnormal cognitive changes compared to the middle referent group. The observation that a lower LVEF is associated with abnormal brain changes extends previous research examining patients with severe cardiomyopathies, which reported that a reduced LVEF was associated with
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Cited by (0)
This study was supported by NHLBI's Framingham Heart Study N01-HC25195; AG027480, AG030962 (Paul B. Beeson Career Development Award in Aging Program), Alzheimer's Association IIRG-08-88733 (A.L.J.); P30-AG013846 (Boston University Alzheimer's Disease Core Center); AG08122, NS017950, AG033040, AG16495 (P.A.W.); AG028321, HL092577 (E.J.B.); AG033193, AG031287 (S.S.); AG021028 (CD), AG010129 (University of California, Davis, Alzheimer's Disease Core Center); and HL070279 (W.J.M.).
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Drs. Beiser and Benjamin contributed equally to this article.