Use whatever name you like… abdominal fat… a spare tire… love handles… muffin top… a new study out of the Boston University School of Medicine that appears online in the Annals of Neurology has found that excess belly fat may actually cause your brain to shrink and increase your dementia risk.
We already know that belly fat ups the risk of heart attack and heart disease. According to researcher Sudha Seshadri, MD, an associate professor of neurology at BUSM, deep belly fat, known to medicine as visceral fat, is the real culprit, and while earlier work has linked belly fat and dementia, most of those studies (except for one in 2008) have had fewer than 300 subjects.
Seshadri and her team did CT scans of the abdomen, and MRI scans of the brain of 733 subjects, both men and (70%) women, who were part of the Framingham Heart Study Offspring Cohort. The average age of the subjects was 60 years old.
The researchers examined the potential associations of body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio and the CT measure of belly fat (both visceral or deep fat, and the subcutaneous fat just under the skin) along with brain volume. The average BMI of the study participants was 28; the average waist circumference was 39 inches.
As a point of reference, experts recommend your BMI should be below 25 (overweight), nowhere near 30 (obese) or 40 (morbidly obese). According to the National Institutes of Health, women should work to keep their waist measurement under 35 inches; men should do what they can to have theirs below 40 inches.
This latest work found that greater the amount of visceral fat, the smaller the volume of the brain, though no one can explain why.
Smaller brain volume is associated with poor thinking on testing and is a greater risk for dementia. Today almost 5.3 million American suffer with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, where memory, language, thinking and judgment are affected.
Continues below…
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Dementia Linked To Too Much Belly Fat… Continued…
The study also found a link between higher BMI measurements and higher waist circumference… which makes intuitive sense, but isn’t always the case. Still experts are far from having all the answers… it’s important to realize that some that get Alzheimer’s disease have done everything right.
What we do know is that fat in the central part of the body serves to pad your internal organs and releases fatty acids, stress hormones and substances that can increase the risks of cardiovascular disease.
What’s more, a single fat cell can grow to a thousand times its original size and then create spin off cells. And once you have a fat cell, it’s yours for life.
The take home message from the study is that you can do something to keep your brain, and your body, healthy… lose that spare tire.
If you don’t already know, find where you stand… calculate your BMI and measure your own waistline. If the numbers aren’t where they should be andyou have excess belly fat, you need to make some changes. It isn’t easy, but it can be done with the simple methods… diet and exercise. The motivation is simple, reduce dementia risk.
