This editorial refers to ‘Associations between single and multiple cardiometabolic disease and cognitive abilities in 14 129 UK Biobank participants’, by D. Lyall et al. doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehw528. The Ebers papyrus dating back to ∼1550 BC contains a treatise on the heart where it refers to this organ as the centre of the body’s blood supply.1 Although blood circulation was not described in this ancient document, diseases such as depression and dementia are discussed as well as their possible treatments. It is anybody’s guess whether early Egyptian physicians suspected that the heart could have a role in mental disorders. Scrolling forward to 1977, an anonymous editor at The Lancet proposed that cardiac dysrhythmia and hypotension in the elderly could be an underdiagnosed cause of cognitive decline and dementia.2 This provocative Editorial was promptly ignored by most readers and unceremoniously shot down by Emerson and colleagues3 in 1981 when they reported no association between cardiac disease and dementia. Except for atrial fibrillation where only four patients from each group were studied, these authors did not examine dyscognitive patients with the cardiac abnormalities listed in Figure 1 , nor did they compare the demented patients with a cognitively intact control group. Figure 1 Selected cardiovascular and cardiometabolic risk factors reported to impact the brain and induce cognitive dysfunction. These risk factors are …