Age-related brain atrophy refers to the gradual loss of neurons and shrinkage of brain tissue, which is a natural part of the ageing process. This condition can contribute to cognitive decline and various neurological issues. While ageing itself cannot be prevented, recent research from an 18-month dietary intervention provides hope that lifestyle and dietary changes may help slow down brain ageing.
Brain age, determined through MRI measurements of the hippocampus and lateral ventricles, reflects the biological aging of the brain, which may differ from a person’s chronological age. Chronological age is simply the number of years a person has lived, while brain age indicates the actual health of the brain. Generally, as we age, the hippocampus tends to shrink, and the lateral ventricles tend to expand, which serve as indicators of brain ageing. Some individuals may have a brain age that is younger or older than their chronological age. A younger brain age suggests better cognitive health, whereas an older brain age may indicate accelerated ageing and an increased risk of cognitive decline.
The study found that a decline in HbA1c and key markers of long-term blood sugar levels is associated with significant positive changes in specific brain regions commonly affected by age-related atrophy. It suggests that improved blood sugar control could be one of the most important factors in slowing down age-related brain changes.
Previous research has shown the benefits of the Green Mediterranean (Green-Med) diet, particularly its positive effects on blood sugar control. This diet is rich in polyphenols from plant-based sources such as Mankai—a high-protein aquatic plant—and green tea, while being low in red and processed meats. The current study reinforces these findings, suggesting that the Green-Med diet not only supports metabolic health but may also have protective effects on brain structure and function.
A new study has found that a low-sugar diet in utero and in the first two years of life can meaningfully reduce the risk of chronic diseases in adulthood. This provides compelling new evidence of the lifelong health effects of early-life sugar consumption.
A study published in the journal Science reveals that children who had sugar restrictions during their first 1,000 days after conception faced up to a 35% lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes and a 20% reduced risk of hypertension in adulthood. The research indicates that low sugar intake by mothers during pregnancy was sufficient to lower these health risks, and maintaining sugar restrictions after birth further enhanced the benefits.
Using an unintended “natural experiment” from World War II, researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, McGill University in Montreal, and the University of California, Berkeley, examined how sugar rationing during the war influenced long-term health outcomes.
The United Kingdom introduced limits on sugar distribution in 1942 as part of its wartime food rationing program. Rationing ended in September 1953.
The researchers used contemporary data from the U.K. Biobank, a database of medical histories and genetic, lifestyle and other disease risk factors, to study the effect of those early-life sugar restrictions on health outcomes of adults conceived in the U.K. just before and after the end of wartime sugar rationing.
“Studying the long-term effects of added sugar on health presents challenges,” explains Tadeja Gracner, a senior economist at the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research and the study’s corresponding author. “It is difficult to identify situations where individuals are randomly exposed to different nutritional environments early in life and tracked over a span of 50 to 60 years. The end of rationing provided us with a unique natural experiment that helped us overcome these obstacles.”
On average, during rationing, sugar intake was about 8 teaspoons (40 grams) per day. When rationing ended, sugar and sweets consumption skyrocketed to about 16 teaspoons (80 grams) per day.
Notably, rationing did not involve extreme food deprivation overall. Diets generally appeared to have been within today’s guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the World Health Organization, which recommend no added sugars for children under two and no more than 12 teaspoons (50g) of added sugar daily for adults.
The immediate and large increase in sugar consumption but no other foods after rationing ended created an interesting natural experiment: Individuals were exposed to varying levels of sugar intake early in life, depending on whether they were conceived or born before or after September 1953. Those conceived or born just before the end of rationing experienced sugar-scarce conditions compared to those born just after who were born into a more sugar-rich environment.
The researchers then identified those born in the U.K. Biobank data collected over 50 years later. Using a very tight birth window around the end of sugar rationing allowed the authors to compare midlife health outcomes of otherwise similar birth cohorts.
While living through the period of sugar restriction during the first 1,000 days of life substantially lowered the risk of developing diabetes and hypertension, for those later diagnosed with either of those conditions, the onset of disease was delayed by four years and two years, respectively.
Notably, exposure to sugar restrictions in utero alone was enough to lower risks, but disease protection increased postnatally once solids were likely introduced.
The researchers say the magnitude of this effect is meaningful as it can save costs, extend life expectancy, and, perhaps more importantly, improve quality of life.
In the United States, individuals with diabetes face average annual medical expenses of approximately $12,000. Additionally, an earlier diagnosis of diabetes is associated with a significantly reduced life expectancy; specifically, for each decade that diagnosis occurs earlier, life expectancy decreases by three to four years.
The researchers note that these numbers underscore the value of early interventions that could delay or prevent this disease.
Experts continue to raise concerns about children’s long-term health as they consume excessive amounts of added sugars during their early life, a critical period of development. Adjusting child sugar consumption, however, is not easy—added sugar is everywhere, even in baby and toddler foods, and children are bombarded with TV ads for sugary snacks, say the researchers.
“Parents need information about what works, and this study provides some of the first causal evidence that reducing added sugar early in life is a powerful step towards improving children’s health over their lifetimes,” says study co-author Claire Boone of McGill University and University of Chicago.
Co-author Paul Gertler of UC Berkeley and the National Bureau of Economics Research adds: “Sugar early in life is the new tobacco, and we should treat it as such by holding food companies accountable to reformulate baby foods with healthier options and regulate the marketing and tax sugary foods targeted at kids.”
This study is the first of a larger research effort exploring how early-life sugar restrictions affected a broader set of economic and health outcomes in later adulthood, including education, wealth, and chronic inflammation, cognitive function and dementia.
Brain endurance training (BET), a combined cognitive and exercise training method developed for athletes, boosts mental and physical abilities in older adults.
According to a new study by researchers at the Universities of Birmingham, UK, and Extremadura, Spain, brain endurance training (BET) can improve attention, executive function (cognition), physical endurance, and resistance exercise performance. BET is a combined exercise and cognitive training method that was initially developed to increase endurance among elite athletes.
The research has significant implications for healthy aging. Previous studies have shown that mental fatigue can impair both cognitive and physical performance, leading to issues such as poorer balance control, and increased risk of falls and accidents. This study, published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, is the first to examine the benefits of BET for both cognitive and physical performance in older adults.
Corresponding author Professor Chris Ring said: “We have shown that BET could be an effective intervention to improve cognitive and physical performance in older adults, even when tired. This could have significant implications for improving this population’s health, including reducing the risk of falls and accidents.”
In the experiment, 24 healthy sedentary women aged between 65-78 were allocated to one of three training groups: brain endurance training (BET), exercise training, and no training (control group). The first two groups each completed three 45-minute exercise sessions per week over eight weeks. Each session included 20 minutes of resistance and 25 minutes of endurance training. While the exercise sessions were the same for each of these groups, the BET group also completed a 20-minute cognitive task before exercising.
All three groups completed a series of cognitive (reaction time and colour-matching tests) and physical tests (walk, chair-stand and arm-curl tests) to assess performance at the start and end of the study. Participants in the BET group outperformed the exercise-only group in the cognitive tasks, with a 7.8% increase in cognitive performance after exercise, compared to a 4.5% increase in the exercise-only group. Regarding physical performance, the BET group achieved a 29.9% improvement, compared to 22.4% for the exercise-only group.
“BET is an effective countermeasure against mental fatigue and its detrimental effects on performance in older adults,” added Professor Ring. “While we still need to extend our research to include larger sample sizes including both men and women, these promising initial findings show we should do more to encourage older people to engage in BET to improve brain and body activities.”
People whose diet more closely resembles the MIND diet may have a lower risk of cognitive impairment.
The MIND diet is a blend of the Mediterranean and DASH diets. It incorporates green leafy vegetables such as spinach, kale, and collard greens, as well as other vegetables. It emphasizes whole grains, olive oil, poultry, fish, beans, and nuts. The diet favours berries over other fruits and suggests consuming one or more servings of fish per week.
“Given the rising number of people with dementia due to the ageing population, it’s crucial to identify changes that can help delay or slow down the onset of cognitive issues,” stated Russell P. Sawyer, MD, a study author from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. “We were particularly interested in determining whether diet influences the risk of cognitive impairment in both Black and white study participants.”
The study involved 14,145 people with an average age of 64. Of the participants, 70% were white, and 30% were Black. They were followed for an average of 10 years.
Participants filled out a questionnaire on their diet over the past year. Researchers looked at how closely the foods people ate matched the MIND diet.
Remember the following dietary guidelines:
– Consume three or more daily servings of whole grains
– Eat six or more weekly servings of green leafy vegetables
– Have one or more daily servings of other vegetables
– Include two or more weekly servings of berries in your diet
– Consume one or more weekly servings of fish
– Include two or more weekly servings of poultry
– Aim for three weekly servings of beans
– Consume five daily servings of nuts
– Limit red meat to four or fewer weekly servings
– Limit fast or fried foods to one or fewer weekly servings
Aim for one or more weekly servings of olive oil
– Limit butter or margarine to one or fewer tablespoons daily
– Keep pastries and sweets to five or fewer weekly servings
– Limit wine to one glass per day
The total number of points possible is 12.
Researchers then divided participants into three groups. The low group had an average diet score of five, the middle group had an average score of seven, and the high group had an average score of nine.
Thinking and memory skills were measured at the beginning and end of the study.
During the study, cognitive impairment developed in 532 people, or 12% of 4,456 people in the low diet group; in 617 people, or 11% of 5,602 people in the middle group; and in 402 people, or 10% of the 4,086 people in the high group.
After adjusting for factors such as age, high blood pressure and diabetes, researchers found people in the high group had a 4% decreased risk of cognitive impairment compared to those in the low group.
Researchers found a 6% decreased risk of cognitive impairment for female participants who closely followed the diet, but no decreased risk for male participants.
Researchers also looked at how quickly people’s thinking skills declined as they developed problems. They found that people who more closely followed the MIND diet declined more slowly than those who did not, and that association was stronger in Black participants than in white participants.
“These findings warrant further study, especially to examine these varying impacts among men and women and Black and white people, but it’s exciting to consider that people could make some simple changes to their diet and potentially reduce or delay their risk of cognitive issues,” said Sawyer.
Poorer visuospatial ability, recall, abstract thinking, working memory, concentration, inhibition
e inflammatory activity in the body caused by rheumatoid arthritis is linked to specific cognitive impairments, finds a small comparative study, published in the open access journal RMD Open.
These are diminished visuospatial abilities, recall, abstract thinking, and the executive functions of working memory, concentration, and inhibition.
Inflammatory activity in rheumatoid arthritis has been associated with various systemic effects, including on the brain, but it’s not clear which specific cognitive domains might be affected.
To try and find out, the researchers compared the cognitive function of 70 adults with rheumatoid arthritis (80% women, average age 56) under the care of one hospital and 70 volunteers without rheumatoid arthritis, and matched for age, sex, and educational attainment.
Nearly 3 out of 4 of the patients (49; 72%) had ongoing moderate to high levels of systemic inflammatory activity caused by their disease, as measured by levels of indicative proteins and the degree of joint inflammation, despite conventional drug treatment. They had had their disease for an average of 10.5 years.
All 140 participants underwent comprehensive neurological and psychological assessment, plus various validated cognitive tests, and assessments of mood and quality of life between June 2022 and June 2023.
Specific cognitive abilities tested were: ability to process and order visuospatial information; naming; attention; language; abstract thinking; delayed recall; and orientation, plus executive functions of working memory, concentration, and inhibition.
Cognitive impairment was defined as a Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) score of less than 26 out of a maximum of 30.
Information was collected on other influential risk factors. These included age; sex; smoking; alcohol intake; high blood pressure; obesity; blood fat levels; diabetes; and a history of heart disease/stroke.
In general, those who were cognitively impaired tended to be older, have lower educational attainment, and more coexisting conditions, such as obesity, unhealthy blood fat levels, and high blood pressure than those with intact cognition.
But patients with rheumatoid arthritis achieved lower average scores in the Montreal Cognitive Assessment than the volunteers (23 vs 25), and lower scores for executive function. Cognitive impairment was recorded in 60% of them compared with 40% of the volunteers.
Significantly more of the patients also scored more highly for anxiety and depression and had lower quality of life scores than the volunteers.
Cognitively impaired patients had more substantial and persistent inflammatory activity than those patients who maintained their cognitive function. And they were more likely to have symptoms of depression and poorer physical capacity.
The factors associated with the greatest risk of cognitive impairment among the patients were obesity (almost 6 times the risk) and inflammatory activity throughout the course of the disease (around double the risk). As in the general population, older age and lower educational attainment were also risk factors.
By way of an explanation for their findings, the researchers point to previous suggestions that the chronic inflammation, autoimmune processes, and persistent symptoms of pain and fatigue associated with rheumatoid arthritis could underpin the diminution of cognitive function.
This is an observational study, so no definitive conclusions about causal factors can be drawn. And the researchers acknowledge various limitations to their findings, including the lack of imaging tests to detect vascular damage associated with cognitive impairment.
But they conclude: “These results support the hypothesis that [rheumatoid arthritis] is a chronic systemic inflammatory disease that affects multiple systems, including neural tissue.
“[And the] results underline the importance of earlier and more stringent control of the activity of arthritis and the need for new therapeutic strategies aimed at associated factors, with the aim of mitigating the risk of cognitive impairment in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.”
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