Tag: brain health

Drinking alcohol every day can speed up brain aging by one week per session, according to a study of more than 17,000 people

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Researchers at the University of Southern California looked at more than 17,000 brain scans to see if daily smoking and drinking advanced brain age. The study found that every gram of alcohol consumed a day aged the brain by 11 days. Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for a year aged the brain by 11 days. It is one of the largest studies ever done on brain aging and alcohol, making the findings quite robust.

by Shira Feder

Over time, drinking a little bit more alcohol than recommended could accelerate the brain’s aging process, according to a new study.

Though previous studies have found the same, most were tentative findings based on small groups of people or large groups of mice.

The new study, from researchers at the University of Southern California, offers a more robust estimate, reached by examining 17,308 human brain scans from the UK Biobank — one of the biggest sample sizes ever seen.

The team found that for every gram of alcohol consumed a day, the brain aged 0.02 years — or, seven-and-a-half days. (The average can of beer or small glass of wine contains 14 grams of alcohol). People who reported drinking every day had brains which were, on average, 0.4 years older than people who didn’t drink daily.

Smoking had even stronger effect: the team found that those who smoke a pack of cigarettes a day for a year age their brains by 0.03 years (11 days).

The researchers took 30% of the brain scans in their study, all from people aged 45 to 81, and used them to train a computer, which scanned each brain to see how old or young they looked.

They then compared the computer’s estimates of each brain’s age with the person’s real age, and their self-reports of how much alcohol and tobacco they consume daily, in order to see if consuming alcohol or tobacco regularly aged the brain.

Comparing those results with the other 70% of their brain scans, they found that the more you drank and smoke, the more likely you were to have a brain aged beyond your actual age.

Lucina Uddin, director of the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Division at the University of Miami, who was not involved in the study, told Insider that the use of an algorithm is what makes this study’s findings so compelling.

“Back in the day we’d scan 20 or 40 subjects, if we were lucky, for neuroimaging studies,” Uddin said. “Now we’re getting bigger numbers like 200 or 300 individuals. But this is the biggest sample we’ve ever seen.”

Because the sample size is so big, scientists can ask questions that apply to the entire population, rather than just a few people.

Brain age is essentially a measure of brain health, says Uddin, who was not surprised by the study’s findings.

“Looking at brain age is a way of checking how well you’ve been taking care of your brain,” she told Insider. “My age is 40, but does my brain look more like a 50-year-old brain or a 60-year-old brain? Do you look younger than your age or older than your age?”

The lead author of the study, Arthur Toga, told Inverse: “The 0.4 years of difference was statistically significant. We suggest that daily or almost daily alcohol consumption can be detrimental to the brain.”

However, many super-agers — people who live well beyond 100 years old, and often appear resistant to the dementia gene — report drinking alcohol now and then.

What’s more, a recent Harvard study found drinking in moderation can have some benefits, particularly for the heart.

Dr. Qi Sun, a co-author of the Harvard study, previously told Insider: “If you drink alcohol, it’s very important that you drink responsibly, not in excess, and that you also focus on eating a healthy diet, maintaining a healthy body weight, not smoking, and exercising. If you don’t drink you don’t need to start drinking.”

https://www.insider.com/alcohol-every-day-ages-your-brain-quicker-17000-brain-scans-2020-1

Scientists have found a previously unknown mechanism in which the protein tau, which is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, damages brain cells by interfering with their internal communications.

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The discovery sheds new light on the origins of this most common cause of dementia, a hallmark of which is the buildup of tangled tau protein filaments in the brain.

The finding could also lead to new treatments for Alzheimer’s and other diseases that progressively destroy brain tissue, conclude the researchers in a paper about their work that now features in the journal Neuron.

Scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Charlestown and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, led the study, which set out to investigate how tau protein might contribute to brain cell damage.

Alzheimer’s disease does not go away and gets worse over time. It is the sixth most common cause of death in adults in the United States, where an estimated 5.7 million people have the disease.

Exact causes of Alzheimer’s still unknown

Exactly what causes Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia is still a mystery to science. Evidence suggests that a combination of environment, genes, and lifestyle is involved, with different factors having different amounts of influence in different people.

Most cases of Alzheimer’s do not show symptoms until people are in their 60s and older. The risk of getting the disease rises rapidly with age after this.

Brain studies of people with the disease — together with postmortem analyses of brain tissue — have revealed much about how Alzheimer’s changes and harms the brain.

“Age-related changes” include: inflammation; shrinkage in some brain regions; creation of unstable, short-lived molecules known as free radicals; and disruption of cellular energy production.

The brain of a person with Alzheimer’s disease also has two distinguishing features: plaques of amyloid protein that form between cells, and tangles of tau protein that form inside cells. The recent study concerns the latter.

Changes to tau behavior

Brain cells, or neurons, have internal structures known as microtubules that support the cell and its function. They are highly active cell components that help carry substances from the body of the cell out to the parts that connect it to other cells.

In healthy brain cells, tau protein normally “binds to and stabilizes” the microtubules. Tau behaves differently, however, in Alzheimer’s disease.

Changes in brain chemistry make tau protein molecules come away from the microtubules and stick to each other instead.

Eventually, the detached tau molecules form long filaments, or neurofibrillary tangles, that disrupt the brain cell’s ability to communicate with other cells.

The new study introduces the possibility that, in Alzheimer’s disease, tau disrupts yet another mechanism that involves communication between the nucleus of the brain cell and its body.

Communication with cell nucleus

The cell nucleus communicates with the rest of the cell using structures called nuclear pores, which comprise more than 400 different proteins and control the movement of molecules.

Studies on the causes of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, frontotemporal, and other types of dementia have suggested that flaws in these nuclear pores are involved somehow.

The recent study reveals that animal and human cells with Alzheimer’s disease have faulty nuclear pores, and that the fault is linked to tau accumulation in the brain cell.

“Under disease conditions,” explains co-senior study author Bradley T. Hyman, the director of the Alzheimer’s Unit at MGH, “it appears that tau interacts with the nuclear pore and changes its properties.”

He and his colleagues discovered that the presence of tau disrupts the orderly structure of nuclear pores containing the major structural protein Nup98. In Alzheimer’s disease cells, there were fewer of these pores and those that were there tended to be stuck to each other.

‘Mislocalized’ Nup98
They also observed another curious change involving Nup98 inside Alzheimer’s disease brain cells. In cells with aggregated tau, the Nup98 was “mislocalized” instead of staying in the nuclear pore.

They revealed that this feature was more exaggerated in brain tissue of people who had died with more extreme forms of Alzheimer’s disease.

Finally, when they added human tau to living cultures of rodent brain cells, the researchers found that it caused mislocalization of Nup98 in the cell body and disrupted the transport of molecules into the nucleus.

This was evidence of a “functional link” between the presence of tau protein and damage to the nuclear transport mechanism.

The authors note, however, that it is not clear whether the Nup98-tau interaction uncovered in the study just occurs because of disease or whether it is a normal mechanism that behaves in an extreme fashion under disease conditions.

They conclude:

“Taken together, our data provide an unconventional mechanism for tau-induced neurodegeneration.”

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322991.php

7 habits to avoid in order to have a healthy brain

On By A.P.In aged brain, ageing, agingLeave a comment

Why are some people sharp as a tack at 95 years old, while others begin struggling with mental clarity in their 50s?

A lot of it has to do with genetics, but certain lifestyle factors also play an important role in how our brain ages. So while you can’t control your genes, you can take advantage of the latest science and avoid these seven big brain mistakes:

Mistake No. 1: Eating a standard American diet

Foods high in sugar, unhealthy fats and processed foods — i.e., the typical American diet — can wreak havoc on your brain over time. Studies have shown that excess sugar consumption can impair learning and memory, and increase your vulnerability to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Some scientists have even referred to Alzheimer’s as “Type 3 Diabetes,” suggesting that diet may have some role in an individual’s risk for developing the disease.

A Mediterranean-based diet, on the other hand, can help protect the brain from signs of aging and ward off cognitive decline. A recent study showed that following this type of diet — which is a good source of brain-healthy nutrients and includes a lot of fish, healthy fats, whole grains and vegetables — could slash Alzheimer’s risk by up to 50 percent.

Mistake No. 2: Living next to a highway

Living in a smoggy city might be bad news for your brain. According to research published this month in the journal Stroke, exposure to air pollution is linked with premature aging of the brain.

The researchers found that people who lived closer to a major highway had greater markers of pollution in their lungs and blood, which increased their risk for a form of brain damage known as “silent strokes,” or symptomless strokes. Increased pollution volume was also linked to decreased brain volume — a major sign of aging.

Mistake No. 3: Drinking a few evening cocktails

Don Draper’s daily cigarettes and two-martini lunches might seem glamorous on “Mad Men,” but research suggests that they’re a fast track to neurodegeneration.

It should come as no surprise that excessive drinking and cigarette smoking at any stage of life can have a negative effect on the brain, damaging brain tissue and leading to cognitive impairment. Alcoholism can cause or accelerate aging of the brain.

But just a couple of glasses of wine a night could pose a risk to brain health, even though there are some cardiovascular benefits. A 2012 Rutgers University study found that moderate to binge drinking — drinking relatively lightly during the week and then more on the weekends — can decrease adult brain cell production by 40 percent.

“In the short term there may not be any noticeable motor skills or overall functioning problems, but in the long term this type of behavior could have an adverse effect on learning and memory,” one of the study’s authors, Rutgers neuroscience graduate student Megan Anderson, said in a statement.

Mistake No. 4: Giving in to stress

Living a stressful lifestyle may be the worst thing you can do for your health as you age. Chronic stress is known to shorten the length of telomeres, the sequences at the end of DNA strands that help determine how fast (or slow) the cells in our body age. By shortening telomeres, stress can accelerate the onset of age-related health problems.

What about the brain? Well, some research has suggested that high levels of stress hormones can increase an individual’s risk for age-related brain damage.

“Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of chronic stress can accumulate and become a risk factor for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease,” Howard Fillit, a clinical professor of geriatric medicine at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine, wrote in Psychology Today. “Several studies have shown that stress, and particularly one’s individual way of reacting to stress (the propensity to become ‘dis-stressed’ often found in neurotic people for example), increases the risk for Alzheimer’s disease.”

If you’re feeling stressed out, try picking up a meditation practice. Research has shown that meditation is effective in lowering levels of the stress hormone cortisol and protecting the brain from aging.

Mistake No. 5: Getting by on less sleep than you need

There are a number of scary health effects associated with sleep deprivation, from a higher risk of stroke and diabetes to impaired cognitive functioning. Over the years, losing shut-eye can also accelerate brain aging. In a study conducted last year, researchers from Singapore found that the less that older adults slept, the faster their brains aged.

The study’s lead author explained in a statement that among older adults, “sleeping less will increase the rate their brain ages and speed up the decline in their cognitive functions.”

Mistake No. 6: Sitting all day

It’s a well-established fact that sitting for long periods is terrible for your health. A growing body of research has linked a sedentary lifestyle with health risks including heart disease, diabetes, cancer and early death, even among people who get the recommended daily amount of exercise.

And it turns out that sitting is also pretty bad for your brain. Research has linked physical inactivity with cognitive decline. Moreover, weight gain in older adults — which may result from too much sitting — has been linked with shrinkage in brain areas associated with memory.

So when in doubt, move around. Physical activity has been linked with a number of brain health benefits, including improved learning and memory.

Mistake No. 7: Zoning out

Use it or lose it! If you want to keep your brain sharp, keep it engaged. It doesn’t have to be a challenging intellectual task or a brain-training game, either — simply engaging in everyday activities like reading, cooking or having a conversation (as opposed to vegging out in front of the TV or computer) can make a difference.

But mental exercises like crossword puzzles and sudoku can help, too. A 2013 study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that brain exercises are more effective than drugs in preventing cognitive decline.

The bottom line? Doing new and novel things promotes neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons in the brain. So get outside, learn, discover and try something new to keep your brain sharp through the decades.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/30/brain-aging-risk-factors_n_7169912.html