Speaker: Professor Lewis A. Lipsitz, MD, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

The process of human aging is associated with several abnormalities in blood pressure regulation that impair an older person’s ability to adapt to the hypotensive stresses of daily life. These include activities such as standing up, eating a meal, or taking blood-pressure lowering medications, all of which reduce cardiac preload. In the cardiovascular system these abnormalities include reduced cardioacceleration, vasoconstriction, diastolic filling, and cardiac output in response to preload reduction. The kidneys also lose some of their ability to conserve salt and water, leading to volume contraction and hypotension when fluid intake is limited. Hypertension compounds the effects of aging by further impairing these blood pressure regulatory mechanisms. Paradoxically, elderly people with hypertension are the most vulnerable to hypotension. Periods of hypotension may lead to ischemic injury in watershed regions of the brain, resulting in executive cognitive dysfunction, slow walking speed, and falls. Fortunately, the judicious treatment of hypertension can improve blood pressure regulatory mechanisms and may prevent some of these consequences.

Lunch will be provided.