Obesity may be bad for the brain, too
Could too much weight be bad for the brain as well as the belly? New research suggests that being overweight or obese may trigger premature aging of the middle-aged brain.
The study centered on how carrying excess weight might affect the brains white matter, which facilitates communication between different brain regions.
White matter tissue is known to shrink with age. But the new study found that the amount of white matter in the brain of a 50-year-old overweight/obese person was comparable to that of a 60-year-old lean person.
Obesity is associated with a host of biological processes that are seen in normal aging, said study author Lisa Ronan, a research associate in the department of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge in England. And therefore we hypothesized that obesity may in fact compound the effects of aging that we see in the brain. This is what we found.
Ronan stressed that its too early to tell what this really means. However, it is possible that being overweight may raise the risk of developing disorders related to neurodegeneration such as Alzheimers disease or dementia, she said.
Still, the study didnt prove obesity causes premature brain aging. And, Ronan noted that there were no differences in cognitive ability between overweight and obese people and their lean counterparts.
Ronan and her colleagues focused on nearly 500 men and women between the ages of 20 and 87. All were residents of the Cambridge region and in good mental health. About half were lean (at a body mass index or BMI between 18.5 and 25). Nearly a third were overweight (BMI 25 to 30), and about 20 percent were obese (BMI over 30). Body mass index is a measure of body fat based on weight in relation to height.
Initial white matter measurements generally revealed that overweight/obese participants had notably reduced white matter volume compared with lean participants.
HealthDay
