NEW YORK – Examining the blood vessels in the retina of the eye may give a clue to the mental status of elderly people and their risk of developing dementia, researchers report.

            The presence of retinal damage, or retinopathy, “is a marker of early damage to the blood vessels in the brain and age to the blood vessels in the brain and is a harbinger of future stroke risk,” said senior investigator Dr. Tien Yin Wong of the University of Melbourne Centre for Eye Research in .

            In order to see if retinopathy could be linked to cognitive function and dementia, Wong and colleagues studied retinal photographs of 2,211 people aged 69 to 97 years. More than half of them had high blood pressure.

            After adjusting for factors such as age, diabetes and smoking status, subjects with retinopathy had lower scores on a standard test of cognitive status than those without (39 versus 41), the team recently reported in the medical journal, Stroke.

            In subjects with high blood pressure, retinopathy doubled the likelihood of having dementia. No such relationship was seen in those without high blood pressure.