Source: http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/brain-1.jpg
News related to obesity has recently been splattered all over the news, even more than usual in my opinion. The latest headline is that obese or overweight patients had significantly less brain matter than those whose weights were considered normal. The research article, “Brain Structure and Obesity,” resulted from a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and was published online this month in the scientific journal Human Brain Mapping. The senior author on the publication was quoted in the U. S. News & World Report as saying, “The brains of obese people looked 16 years older than their healthy counterparts while [those of] overweight people looked 8 years older.”
An important thing to note about the research article is that their test subjects were an average age of 77 years old; therefore, these specific results are only applicable to the elderly population. I looked through the research article itself and was happy to see that the genders were fairly represented in the test groups, with women comprising approximately 50% of the patients tested in normal, overweight, and obese groups. As presented in the paper, authors did not find any striking differences correlated to gender; their results were equally applicable to both men and women. It was acknowledged that there is some controversy among scientists regarding the association between brain volume and gender, and the authors cited additional published studies from other laboratories. It was noted in their conclusion that gender effects are an important variable to pay attention to in future studies. You can access a summary of the research article here.
Obesity is a sensitive issue for everyone, but a 2006 study suggested that it may affect the quality of life of women more than men. A team led by Dr. Peter Muennig of Columbia University looked at existing data from a 2000 survey on health and quality of life. More than 13,000 adults participated in this survey administered by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Muennig and colleagues also incorporated data from 1990-1995 on death rates in the U. S. into their study. They concluded that health-related drops in quality of life scores were four times higher for overweight women than overweight men, and more than two times higher for obese women than obese men. More strikingly, the authors found that there were about twice as many deaths among overweight and obese women than for men (when compared to their normal-weight counterparts) for the time represented in their study. WebMD has a nice summary of the article here (including its caveats), or you can access the full article for free through PubMed Central.
You can help further these studies by participating in ventures such as the Illinois Women’s Health Registry, or similar surveys administered in your state (or country, etc.)! What do you think about these studies and their results? Has obesity affected you or your loved ones in any way?
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7 Comments
Great blog post, Alison!!
That’s such an odd finding. They didn’t find a loss of brain activity, but a loss of actual brain tissue?? Creepy! Other than neurodegenerative diseases that cause big holes in the brain tissue, I wasn’t aware that the brain could just lose mass, especially from something so seemingly unrelated as weight gain. Did they give any guesses to why the correlation exists?
They didn’t think the correlation was direct, i.e. that obesity caused loss in brain volume or vice versa. Instead, they think it was an indirect relationship caused by factors that can affect both body mass index and brain tissue like reduced exercise, respiratory defects, or Type II diabetes among others. There definitely needs to be more follow-up work done to tease out where the direct relationships are!
Thanks Alison, what great articles! The increased obesity rates over the past 20 years are staggering and it’s very concerning as a parent. You want to feed your child well and give them the best start, but so much of the information is difficult to decipher. Plus we are surrounded by junk food all the time!
Check out this CDC link if you haven’t already and click through the years. http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
With asthma and allergies, autism, gluten insensitivity, ADHD, all having links to nutrition, as a country we really need to focus our energy on prevention and wellness. I truly believe many diseases and health conditions can be avoided simply by altering our diets. The tricky thing is to figure out how and to have will-power.
Two main culprits I desperately try to stay away from are high fructose corn syrup and any product that has the word hydrogenated in the label (although I do love my Coffee-mate creamer).
You’d think eating lots of stuff with extra hydrogen would make us lighter! Hahahaha.
To bring out another point about the interplay between science and government/society, the only real reason we have so much HFCS in our diets in the US is because our government has made corn a much cheaper sweetener than regular sugar. By placing high import fees and taxes on sugar, they protect the interests of the American farmer, possibly at the health risk to all of us. Yet another reason we should all stay educated on the science that directly affects us.
This is an interesting research about how our brain affects our weight. I am wondering if brain power of individual has something to do with obesity? Indeed reserach like this is always a good read. TFS!
it is said that a 2006 study suggested that Obesity may affect the quality of life of women more than men. Well, all women should aware of this. anyway, thanks for sharing
yes, lots of disease came from obesity ,and 60% of U.S people are overweight, how can we fix it? that`s the question
btw thanks for this nice info