Excess weight can accelerate brain aging - Observations of the nervous system in lean and obese people have shown that the brain tissue of fat people on average looks 10 years older than their peers who do not have weight problems, according to an article published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.
“As we age, our brain gradually decreases in volume, and for some reason this process is faster in obese people than in people of normal weight.
We don’t know why this is happening, and we can only wonder if obesity is causing the brain to “shrink” faster, or vice versa, whether the processes that make the brain age faster lead to obesity,”said Lisa Ronan of the University of Cambridge. (Great Britain).
Ronan and her colleagues discovered this unusual phenomenon by studying images of the brains of more than 500 Cambridge residents aged 20 to 87 years, obtained using a magnetic resonance imaging scanner at a hospital in the city.
Scientists were interested in how dietary habits, metabolic status and other things related to obesity and diabetes affect the rate of brain aging and the susceptibility of its cells to death. Using MRI data, British neurophysiologists calculated the volume of white matter in their wards, the thickness of the cortex and its area in fat and slender people, and compared them with each other.
As their analysis showed, differences in the structure of the brain did exist in them, and they began to noticeably manifest themselves only after 40 years of life. After reaching this mark, the brain of obese people began to rapidly age and shrink in volume, and by the age of 50, its volume and structure corresponded to what the brain looked like in slender people at 60 years old.
Interestingly, this process mainly affected the white matter of the brain and almost did not touch the cortex, whose area and thickness were approximately the same in both fat and thin elderly people. This is generally in line with the fact that the cognitive abilities and IQs of fat and thin people in this age group are approximately equal to each other.
So far, scientists do not know what is the cause and effect of this phenomenon of accelerated aging of the brain in fat men. The answer to this question, according to Ronan, is extremely important, as the world's population is rapidly aging and gaining weight, and protecting the brain from withering may become one of the main tasks of medicine in the coming decades.
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