New research reveals that the brains of obese older persons display gray matter loss patterns that are remarkably comparable to those found in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s patients show considerably more severe brain shrinkage than cognitively fit, obese people of the same age, despite the fact that the patterns of tissue loss are similar across the two groups.
In obese people, the alterations are substantially milder. Obesity is a key risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, but the pattern of tissue loss in obese people may provide light on this association. Obesity in middle age has been linked in previous research to an increased chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia in later life.
It’s further proof that obesity, a key cardiovascular risk factor, is connected to neurodegeneration, or the slow but steady death of brain cells.
Burns told Live Science that the new study, which was published on Tuesday (January 31) in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, cannot explain the specific reason of this tissue loss or identify which of the cognitively healthy, obese patients could go on to acquire dementia. Reasons for this include the fact that the data was collected and analyzed just once, when the participants were in their early to mid-70s.
Preceding this current study, scientists have discovered a relationship between obesity and certain types of gray matter atrophy in persons aged 60 and over. The cerebral cortex, the wrinkly outer layer of the brain, is where you’ll find the most gray matter, which consists of the bodies of brain cells (neurons) and the uninsulated wiring that runs from those cells.
The researchers used brain scans of persons with moderate Alzheimer’s and of healthy people without cognitive impairment from the ADNI database, which was developed in the United States. They gathered brain scans of mentally healthy people from the UK Biobank and categorized them according to their body mass index (BMI), a metric used to quantify excess body fat.
