Even without nudging blood pressure up, high-salt diet hobbles the brain

A high-salt diet may spell trouble for the brain -- and for mental performance -- even if it doesn't push blood pressure into dangerous territory, new research has found. A new study has shown that in mice fed a very high-salt diet, blood flow to the brain declined, the integrity of blood vessels in the brain suffered, and performance on tests of cognitive function plummeted. But researchers found that those effects were not, as has long been widely believed, a natural consequence of high blood pressure. Instead, they appeared to be the result of signals sent from the gut to the brain by the immune system. The study, conducted by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, was published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.