Being Overweight Or Obese Can Cause The Brain To Age Quickly

Obesity has been known to have a negative effect on a person's health. But did you know that obesity can be bad for the brain, too? A recent study has made claims that being overweight or obese may cause the premature aging of the middle-aged brain.

According to U.S. News, the study was focused on how carrying excess weight can affect the brain's white matter, which promotes communication between the different regions of the brain. It is said that the white matter is a tissue known to shrink as the person ages. However, the new study discovered that the number of white matter in the brain of a 50-year-old overweight or obese person can be compared to that of a 60-year-old lean individual.

"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."

Researchers from the United Kingdom took brain scans of people who were about 40 years old to measure the effect of weight on the brain's structure and the amount of white matter. They found that among the 473 men and women in the study, 246 had healthy weight, 150 were overweight and 77 obese. The men and women in the study also took similar IQ test to measure their cognitive skills.

Upi.com reported that Ronan pointed out that it's "too early to tell" what the findings mean. "However, it is possible that being overweight may raise the risk of developing disorders related to neurodegeneration such as Alzheimer's disease or dementia," she added. Even with that conclusion, the study still did not show evidence that obesity can cause premature brain aging. Ronan also said that there were no significant differences in the cognitive ability between overweight and obese people and the lean ones.

''The white matter of the brain is thought to be the first to go with dementia," says Mike Henne, PhD, a spokesman for the American Federation for Aging Research. Loss of white matter is generally associated with "foggy-mindedness," he says. Some experts think that the white matter cells may turn out to be more sensitive to inflammation during the middle age. "One possibility, and the researchers talk about that [in the report], is that when you are obese your fat cells are producing more inflammatory agents and your white matter is more sensitive to it," Henne says. "That is a leading theory in the field."

Meanwhile, wedmd.com reported Ronan saying that a limitation the study faced was that she only evaluated the people at one particular time. While the current study did not connect being overweight/obese with an early onset of thinking problems and dementia, some experts are convinced that it "needs to be given attention, since this is the area that is often neglected by experts," Henne said.