Brain Tumors, Smoking Guns & High Blood Pressure

If you smoke for thirty years and then get lung cancer, you don’t have to guess a lot about the cause. If you ask “why did I get this tumor?” the answers to that question, though, are often vague, because there’s not a lot of “smoking guns” for brain tumors. 

According to the American Brain Tumor Association – www.abta.org – meningioma tumors tend to occur in older adults sixty or older and they occur about twice as often in women as in men. As it turns out, I’m not quite that old, but close enough. The ABTA also reports that “Risk factors for meningioma include prior radiation exposure to the head, and a genetic disorder called ‘neurofibroamatosis type 2’.” The report goes on to state that meningiomas occur in people with no risk factors…as I know all too well.

Of course if your head has been exposed to radiation and/or you figure out that you have the genetic disorder named “neurofibroamatosis type 2”, this might increase your blood pressure a tad.

And that could be bad.

Why?

According to a study that tracked 580,000 people for ten years in Austria, Norway and Sweden, and found that “…20% of participants with the highest blood pressure readings were more than twice as likely to later be diagnosed with meningioma or malignant glioma compared with the 20% with the lowest readings” as the Journal of Hypertension.  Given the magnitude of the people tracked and length of the study, I thought it worth bringing to your attention.

 
Here’s a link to the article in The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/21/high-blood-pressure-brain-tumour-risk_n_1162137.html