A new study links obesity to patterns of brain tissue loss that overlap with those seen in Alzheimer's disease.
The brains of older adults with obesity show patterns of gray matter loss that are strikingly similar to those seen in people with early Alzheimer's disease, a new study suggests. These patterns overlap in the location of the tissue loss but not in the severity; in other words, Alzheimer's patients exhibit a far greater degree of brain atrophy than cognitively healthy, obese adults of the same age do.
However, the new research, published Tuesday in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease , cannot reveal the exact cause of this tissue loss, nor can it pinpoint which of the cognitively healthy, obese participants might go on to develop dementia, Burns told Live Science. That's partly because the analyses captured only one point in time, in each participant's early to mid-70s.
Prior to their new study, Morys and his colleagues found evidence that, in people in their 60s, obesity seems linked to distinct patterns of thinning in the brain's gray matter. Named for its color, gray matter is made up of the bodies of brain cells, or neurons, and the uninsulated wiring that extends from those cells; gray matter is found primarily in the cerebral cortex, the brain's wrinkled outer surface.
In all, the team used brain scans from more than 1,300 individuals to generate maps of cortical thickness for people of different BMIs and people with and without Alzheimer's. By comparing the maps, they pinpointed regions of the cortex that appeared thin in people with obesity and those with Alzheimer's, but not in lean, cognitively healthy individuals. These overlapping regions showed up even when people with both obesity and Alzheimer's were excluded from the analysis.
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