Nearly 40,000 frozen blood samples collected during one of the largest U.S. studies of high blood pressure may soon reveal critical clues about who is most at risk for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia — and a Phoenix researcher is helping to lead the charge.

DEEPER DIVE: Here are the 10 coolest offices in Arizona for 2025

LOCAL NEWS: 10 things you may not know are manufactured in Arizona

INDUSTRY INSIGHTS: Want more news like this? Get our free newsletter here

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $21.6 million, five-year grant to a team of researchers, including Banner Alzheimer’s Institute, to explore how hypertension may contribute to brain disease. Their work will focus on identifying molecules in blood that signal the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s and related dementias.

This groundbreaking study represents a first-of-its-kind approach that positions Banner Alzheimer’s Institute at the forefront of innovative dementia research. It will be the first and only study to obtain Alzheimer’s disease blood biomarkers from samples collected during a previously completed, landmark interventional study on blood pressure goals, specifically examining outcomes of mild cognitive impairment and dementia.

“High blood pressure is one of the biggest modifiable risk factors for dementia, but we still don’t fully understand why,” said Jeremy Pruzin, MD, behavioral neurologist at Banner Alzheimer’s Institute and a principal investigator on the study. “We hope our findings will help identify which patients face the highest dementia risk and guide more personalized approaches to managing blood pressure.”

The project offers a unique opportunity to understand how blood pressure intersects with Alzheimer’s disease pathology and dementia risk. The research team will analyze blood samples collected from the SPRINT trial, a landmark nationwide study on intensive blood pressure control, and plans to share the resulting data with the broader scientific community to accelerate discovery. Hidden in many of these blood samples are subtle chemical signals that point to their donors’ current and future brain health conditions — among them Alzheimer’s and related dementias, the most common cause of disability among adults over 65.

Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia, a condition that disrupts memory and thinking to the point of interfering with daily life. The most common kind of dementia is Alzheimer’s, caused by protein buildup in the brain, but dementia can also be caused by problems with the blood vessels in the brain. Researchers hope this work will help delay or prevent the disease in future generations.

Adam Bress, PharmD, professor of population health sciences at University of Utah Health, investigator at the VA Salt Lake City Healthcare System, and a principal investigator on the study, explains that the project aims to answer a few big questions:

• How does lowering blood pressure more intensively affect brain health?

• Does (hypertension treatment) affect brain health through pathways around Alzheimer’s disease — protein plaques and tangles — or is it through the blood vessels themselves?

• How does having Alzheimer’s pathology in your brain impact how we treat your high blood pressure?”

Key to answering these questions will be the researchers’ use of a new technology: a recently discovered blood biomarker that diagnoses Alzheimer’s-related brain changes nearly as well as the gold standards of a brain PET scan or cerebrospinal fluid sample.

The blood biomarkers will be cross-referenced with comprehensive health information to determine how the effectiveness of blood pressure treatment can change based on genetics, demographics, and existing health conditions. For instance, the study aims to find out whether intensive hypertension treatments still reduce dementia risk for people with genetic susceptibilities to dementia. Answering these questions will help doctors provide targeted interventions to help each patient.

“The other thing that’s crucial about this grant, which is probably one of the biggest things, is we’re going to post all the data publicly,” Bress adds. Data on five different blood biomarkers will be matched with clinical cognitive outcomes and dementia diagnoses — a detailed resource to power future studies. “This is going to be one of the largest repositories of its kind in the world.”

Banner will receive nearly $17.8 million of the grant for this project. 

This work is supported by NIH’s National Institute on Aging under award number 1R01AG096179-01.