Scientists compared brain scans of elderly people with and without Alzheimer's disease, as well as
The authors suggested that the brains of older peopleThose with obesity also show gray matter loss, as do people with early-stage Alzheimer's disease. These patterns overlap in the location of tissue loss, but not in the severity. In other words, patients with Alzheimer's disease have a much higher degree of brain atrophy than cognitively healthy people of the same age with obesity.
In the past, experts have already linked obesity to the averageage with an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia in the future. The new study provides further evidence that this factor is associated with signs of neurodegeneration, or the progressive loss of brain cells.
Scientists have used brain scans over1,300 people to create cortical thickness maps for people with different BMIs (body mass index) and people with and without Alzheimer's disease. Comparing them, they identified areas of the cortex that appeared thin in people with obesity and Alzheimer's disease, but not in cognitively healthy people with normal body shapes. These overlapping areas were found even when people with obesity and Alzheimer's disease were excluded from the analysis.
These maps compare the thickness of the cerebral cortex of obese older adults with those of people with Alzheimer's disease.
Darker colors indicate similarities in bark thickness between the two groups. Image courtesy of Philip Maurice
However, the authors of the new work cannot identify the exact cause of tissue loss, nor which of the cognitively healthy obese participants may develop dementia.
Read more:
Scientists have named the top 6 ways to "save" the memory of older people
A mysterious imprint underground surprised scientists. He is over 1000 years old
Sword thought to be fake turns out to be a 3,000-year-old Bronze Age artifact
Cover: CT and MRI scans of the brain courtesy of Wei-yuan Huang, Gang Wu, Feng Chen, Meng-meng Li and Jian-jun Li