Middle Age Spread Increases Your Risk of Diabetes

Wed, 03 Aug 2011
A growing waistline increases your likelihood of developing diabetes and could cause the brain to shrink.

Recent research highlights that diabetes, smoking and high blood pressure all have an adverse impact on the brain, taking effect on brainpower ten years later.

Researchers state that GPs could take heed from this information and select patients more likely to develop dementia and encourage them to improve their lifestyles now.

Those aged over 50 and obese performed poorly on the mental tests within this study.

At the start of this American study, 1,300 men and women in their 50s and 60s had their weight and height measured, as well as having cholesterol, blood and diabetes tests.

Brain volume scans and mental tests were undertaken over the next ten years on the participants.

All our brains shrink with age. Yet for diabetics, the hippocampus, the brain’s ‘memory hub’, shrank more rapidly than non-diabetics .

Those who are overweight are doubly likely to develop dementia post 75.

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