March 18, 2015
By Julie Corliss, Executive Editor, Harvard Heart Letter
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If you’re among the one in three American adults with high blood pressure, be sure you’re getting plenty of the B vitamin known as folate. Doing so may lower your odds of having a stroke, an often disabling or deadly event linked to high blood pressure, a new study suggests.
Folate occurs naturally in many foods, but especially green leafy vegetables, beans, and citrus fruits. Here in the United States, add to the list most grain products, including wheat flour, cornmeal, pasta, and rice. They are fortified with the synthetic version of folate, known as folic acid.
That’s not the case in many countries around the world, including China, where the new study was done. Published online this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it included more than 20,000 adults in China with high blood pressure who had never had a stroke or heart attack. Participants who took folic acid supplements along with the blood-pressure lowering medicine enalapril (Vasotec) were less likely to have had a stroke over the 4½-year trial than those who took enalapril alone.
