Heart procedures linked to cognitive decline

In a new study of German heart patients, people who had invasive bypass surgery and those who underwent less-invasive stent placement showed declines in thinking and memory skills a few months after the procedures.

Doctors have long been concerned about cognitive decline in patients who undergo coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) because of blocked arteries, and indeed, memory deficits were more significant after those procedures than after stenting.

Still, the findings don’t prove it’s the procedures themselves that cause memory decline — it could just be that plaque build-up in blood vessels in both the heart and the brain is causing a variety of problems in the same patients.

‘These patients obviously all have atherosclerosis,’ said Dr. Mark Newman, who studies cognitive decline after cardiac surgery at the Duke University Medical Centre in Durham, North Carolina.

‘If you have atherosclerosis in your coronary vessels, you probably have it in other vessels in your body as well.’

Patients who are treated with CABG are often in a worse health state, with more build-up, than those who undergo stenting. It could be that ‘cognitive decline after these procedures more relates to the severity of the atherosclerosis than the procedure itself,’ Newman, who wasn’t involved in the new research, told Reuters Health. ‘I think that’s still a debate.’

Even so, it makes sense that when built-up cholesterol in heart vessels is nudged loose during surgery, it could travel to the brain and cause problems there, researchers said.