Mitchell S.V. Elkind, M.D., is American Heart Association president-elect, Chair of the Advisory Committee of the American Stroke Association — a division of the American Heart Association and professor of neurology and epidemiology at Columbia University in New York. copyright American Heart Association "This analysis of the spring trial suggests that there's additional years of life that can be added by more aggressive control of blood pressure. But what would be a really interesting thing to see in the future I think would be what the extra benefit is not just in terms of lifespan, how many years somebody lives, but also what the quality of that life is. So, extending life if one has cognitive problems or functional limitations may be good, but maybe not as good as we would like. But if we can extend healthy life or extend life free of cognitive problems or dementia, what we call healthy aging, if we can improve that, that would be an even bigger benefit. In one analysis of the spring study that was previously published, they showed that there was some evidence of benefit of lowering blood pressure on the occurrence of dementia as well. And although that result was not statistically significant, there was a strong suggestion of that benefit. So, I think it would be interesting to see not just what the effect of lowering blood pressure is on lifespan itself, but on a healthy lifespan or a lifespan free of cognitive issues later in life, and I expect once we look at those benefits, they'll be even more impressive than the benefits we see in lifespan itself. So I think this is really good news for cardiovascular disease in general, but also specifically for brain health as well."