Where you can store fats may affect its effect on your mind

The effects of our fat may vary on our movement and emotions, and even the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease depending on the place where it is located in the body.

When it comes to studying the health consequences of excess fat, he focused on a lot of research on the abdomen, where there is a lot It is associated with the worst awareness and My heart. The few studies that were considered fat in other regions mainly included a small number of participants.

To expand this knowledge, ANQI QIU At the University of Hong Kong Polytechnic, her colleagues analyzed how fat might affect four parts of the body – arms, legs, trunk and around the internal organs – on the brain.

The team collected body composition tests Brain depiction Results from more than 18,000 adults, with an average age of 62, participated in the UK’s vital bank project. After calculating factors such as age, researchers linked excess fat in each of these areas with distinct changes in the brain.

For example, higher quantities of average fat in the arm and trunk were associated with thinning in the sensory cortex, an area involved in the movement. The arm is also associated with a decrease in the size of the hippocampus. Decisive to memory, this is one of the first regions affected by Alzheimer’s disease, which may explain the reason for linking other studies to storing fat in the arms Top risk of nerve degenerative cases.

The researchers also found that the fat in the leg is higher than the average was linked to the low connection in the brain of the brain, which regulates emotions and remedy the rewards. They think this may be due Under the fat in the body, the leptin is secretedA hormone that regulates hunger, with higher levels of leptin associated with lower lofty connection.

But there was more fat around the internal organs, known as the visceral fat, which had the strongest association with the variable brain function. This was the only type of fat that the team that was not associated with preserving the white matter, is the tissue that transmits signals between the different brain regions. Instead, he was associated with his deterioration, an other distinctive feature of Alzheimer’s disease.

This may be because the visceral fat produces more inflammatory molecules than fats in other regions, he says Sonia Anand At McMaster University in Canada, which can stimulate encephalitis in the brain.

It is unclear why fats were linked to the arm with both preventive and brain changes. “It was surprising that things would go in two different ways,” he says. Michal Schnaider Beeri At the University of Rutgers, New Jersey. But this also shows the complexity of the relationship between body fat and brain health, as she adds.

The study only looked at the connections between the body fat and the function of the brain, so “you cannot conclude the causal of any kind,” says Beeri. She says some brain changes actually affect the distribution of fat. Anand says the results are also limited to the fact that most participants were eggs, so they may not be applicable to the broader population.

However, the results confirm the idea that the different types and locations of the fat have different effects. This may mean that developing treatments that target visceral fats have a greater impact on brain health more than random weight loss interventions, she says.

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