Smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity linked to unhealthy brain

Here is another reason to let go of unhealthy addictions. According to a recent study, factors that influence the health of our blood vessels, such as smoking, high blood and pulse pressures, obesity and diabetes, are linked to less healthy brains.

The study examined the associations between seven vascular risk factors and differences in the structures of parts of the brain. The strongest links were with areas of the brain known to be responsible for our more complex thinking skills, and which deteriorate during the development of  Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
 

The researchers,  examined MRI scans of brains of 9,772 people, aged between 44 and 79, who were enrolled in the study - one of the largest groups of people from the general population to have data available on brain imaging as well as general health and medical information. All had been scanned by a single scanner, and most of the participants were from the north-west of England. This is the world's largest single-scanner study of multiple vascular risk factors and structural brain imaging.

The researchers looked for associations between brain structure and one or more vascular risk factors, which included smoking, high blood pressure, high pulse pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol levels, and obesity as measured by body mass index (BMI) and waist-hip ratio. These have all been linked to complications with the blood supply to the brain, potentially leading to reduced blood flow and the abnormal changes seen in Alzheimer's disease.

They found that, with the exception of high cholesterol levels, all of the other vascular risk factors were linked to greater brain shrinkage, less grey matter (tissue found mainly on the surface of the brain) and less healthy white matter (tissue in deeper parts of the brain). The more vascular risk factors a person had, the poorer was their brain health.

Findings of the study showed the associations between risk factors and brain health and structure were not evenly spread across the whole brain; rather, the areas affected were mainly those known to be linked to our more complex thinking skills and to those areas that show changes in dementia and 'typical' Alzheimer's disease.

Although the differences in brain structure were generally quite small, these are only a few possible factors of a potentially huge number of things that might affect brain ageing," Cox explained.
Smoking, high blood pressure and diabetes were the three vascular risk factors that showed the most consistent associations across all types of brain tissue types measured. High cholesterol levels were not associated with any differences in the MRI scans.

According to the researchers, lifestyle factors are much easier to change than things like your genetic code- both of which seem to affect susceptibility to worse brain and cognitive ageing. Because we found the associations were just as strong in mid-life as they were in later life, it suggests that addressing these factors early might mitigate future negative effects. These findings might provide an additional motivation to improve vascular health beyond respiratory and cardiovascular benefits.

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Stroke ages the brain 8 years overnight'

In a study investigating the different levels of cognitive decline between black and white people, stroke could not explain the disparity, and instead showed the same impact across races - to result in a loss of cognitive function equivalent to the brain aging by an average of 8 years.

 In both the black and white patients studied, having had a stroke meant that their score on a 27-item test of memory and thinking speed had dropped as much as it would have if they had aged 7.9 years overnight.

The results come from an analysis of data from over 4,900 black and white seniors aged over 65 years, published in the journal Stroke.

Lead author of the study  says:
"As we search for the key drivers of the known disparities in cognitive decline between blacks and whites, we focus here on the role of 'health shocks' such as stroke."

"Although we found that stroke does not explain the difference," Dr. adds, "these results show the amount of cognitive aging that stroke brings on, and therefore the importance of stroke prevention to reduce the risk of cognitive decline."

The researchers narrowed down to those participants with no history of stroke, dementia or other cognitive issues recently, but instead within 12 years of their first survey and cognitive test done for the research in 1998 - representing 7.5% of black study participants and 6.7% of white.

The measure of a stroke's effect on brain power was achieved by measuring changes in cognitive test scores over time from 1998 to 2012.

Both black people and white fared significantly worse on these tests after their stroke compared with performance before stroke.

The researchers say that racial differences on overall levels of cognitive decline remain in need of explanation but that "one thing is clear: strokes have serious consequences for brain function."
Therefore, they add, people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds can benefit from taking steps to reduce their risk of a stroke.
Such stroke preventive steps include:

• Controlling blood pressure and cholesterol
• Quit smoking
• Controlling blood sugar in diabetes
• Maintaining physical activity.

Although the size of the stroke effect on cognitive decline was the same among blacks and whites in this study, past research has shown that, generally, the rates of cognitive problems in older non-Hispanic white people are half those of older black people.

The results suggest that stroke can be ruled out as accounting for "the mysterious differences in memory and cognition that grow along racial lines as people age."

While this study looked for any stroke racial differences, and found none, other studies on the race disparities in cognitive decline have focused on socioeconomic status, education and vascular risk factors for stroke such as diabetes, high blood pressure and smoking.

The authors explain that, as well as genetic and biological factors, the number of years a person has vascular risk factors and the quality of their education may play a role in racial differences in long-term cognitive performance. However, these factors may explain some but not all of the racial differences.

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