A new study has come to the surprising conclusion that those with high blood pressure tend to get Alzheimer’s disease less often — but not for the reasons you might think.

Instead, the anti-hypertension medication that people with high BP take may be a strong cause for the lower incidence of Alzheimer’s, according to an Economic Times report.

The study involved 17,008 individuals with Alzheimer’s and 37,154 without it. Its purpose was to find links between Alzheimer’s and other health conditions. The only significant relationship they found was with higher systolic blood pressure — and, surprisingly, this generally negative medical condition had a very positive correlation with lower Alzheimer’s risk.

Unfortunately, simply having high blood pressure may not result in lower likelihood of getting the disease, said co-author Paul Crane, associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Washington, according to the report.

High blood pressure could be protective, but it seems just as possible that antihypertensive medication is what’s really causing the protection, Crane said.

He called it the most authoritative paper yet looking at causal relationships between Alzheimer’s and other diseases to get an idea of what other causes or solutions might be out there.

The study was published in Plos Medicine.

Alzheimer’s is a chronic neurodegenerative disease that worsens over time and results in the loss of memory and cognitive abilities. It most commonly affects the elderly and accounts for 60 to 70 percent of all cases of dementia. Early symptoms include failing to remember recent events, and they advance to problems with language and disorientation as the disease progresses.