Men at high risk for this disease have brains that age 10 years earlier than women

A study found that men with cardiovascular disease risk factors such as obesity have a decline in brain health 10 years earlier than women.

Researchers from the Department of Neuroscience at Imperial College London, UK, said that cardiovascular disease risk factors such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and smoking increase the risk of developing dementia, and when is the best time to start appropriate treatment to prevent related neurodegeneration? The background of the study was stated to be to find out whether To do this, the researchers analyzed abdominal and brain scan data from 34,425 adult participants aged 45 to 82 years from the UK Biobank. The average age was 63 years old.

The researchers assessed their cardiovascular disease risk using the Framingham Risk Score and recorded changes in brain structure and volume using a neuroimaging technique called voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to determine cardiovascular risk, abdominal The effect of fat, fat surrounding body organs, on neurodegeneration in the brain was confirmed.

The analysis results showed that the higher the abdominal fat and visceral fat levels, the lower the brain gray matter volume in both men and women. In addition, the period when cardiovascular risk and obesity most strongly affect brain neurodegeneration is between the ages of 55 and 64 for men and between 65 and 74 for women, with the effects appearing 10 years earlier in men.

Importantly, this association was observed regardless of whether or not the APOE ε4 gene was carried. The most vulnerable areas of the brain are those involved in hearing, vision, emotional processing, and memory, and the effects of damage to these areas were just as evident in people who did not carry the APOE ε4 gene as in those who did.

APOE ε4 is a high-risk variant of the apolipoprotein E gene, and people with APOE ε4 are known to be more prone to Alzheimer’s disease. There are also research results showing that if you have the APOE ε4 allele, your cognitive decline will be faster than if you do not have it.

“The deleterious effects of cardiovascular disease were widespread across cortical regions, showing how cardiovascular risk can impair a variety of cognitive functions,” the researchers said. “Therefore, in the presence of modifiable cardiovascular disease risk factors, including obesity, “Special attention needs to be paid to the treatment and prevention of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “Given the results of this study, it may be essential to target cardiovascular risk and obesity in men 10 years before women to achieve therapeutic benefits in preventing neurodegeneration and cognitive decline,” he added.

Meanwhile, the researchers acknowledged that this study has several limitations, such as the fact that it is an observational study and therefore cannot draw firm conclusions about causal relationships, and that specific biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease were not recorded in the UK Biobank.

The results of this study were published in the international medical journal 《Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry》 under the title ‘Cardiovascular risk and obesity impact loss of gray matter volume earlier in males than females’.