As we age, we lose muscle mass and increase visceral fat, which surrounds organs such as the heart and kidneys. Medical experts have now discovered links between that ratio of muscle mass and visceral fat and our brain health.
People with greater muscularity tend to have smaller brains.young than what would correspond to their age, according to research presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Radiological Association.
“If you want to have a healthy brain you need to have healthy muscles.”
Glenn Gaesser physiology teacher
“We know that someone’s age in terms of how they look doesn’t always match their chronological age,” said the analysis’s lead author, Cyrus Raji. “Well, it turns out that the age of their body organs sometimes doesn’t match either,” he added.
These findings are especially important because it is already known that the way in which gets old The brain is an important marker of the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.
(Risk of dementia nearly doubles as Americans live longer, study finds)
“The risk of these diseases goes beyond a single organ, it does not stay in a single anatomical quadrant,” said Raji, a professor of radiology and neurology at Washington University in St. Louis.
There are previous studies, including some by Raji, that show a relationship between the amount of visceral fat and loss of brain volume, cognitive problems and structural changes in gray matter.
The most recent study led by Raji analyzed 1,164 healthy people aged around 55; About half were women and 39% were Hispanic, Black, Asian, or Indigenous. They underwent magnetic resonance imaging (or MRI) to analyze their muscle, fat and brain tissues.
(Aging Latino in the United States: The Challenges of Access to Health Care)
To determine each person’s brain age, Raji and his collaborators used an algorithm developed from previous analyzes of more than 5,000 adults. Thus, they determined that the average brain age of the 1,164 patients was 56.04 years; that is, greater than the chronological one.
Visceral fat, which is the worst type of fat, is linked to higher chances of having diabetes, developing insulin resistance or prediabetes, and high cholesterol rates.”
cyrus raji, doctor
The difference between the two was called the brain age gap. On average the variation was 0.69 years, or about eight months.
Patients with younger brain ages generally had greater muscle mass and a lower proportion of visceral fat compared to their musculature. Those with older brains generally had higher levels of visceral fat.
That is, visceral fat or fat hidden contributed most to having an older brain, according to the study.
“Visceral fat, which is the worst type of fat, is linked to higher chances of having diabetes, developing insulin resistance or prediabetes, and rates of high cholesterol,” Raji said.
“That makes the body in general more inflamed, which over time affects our brain. And that’s how we believe obesity contributes to Alzheimer’s,” he added.
Methods other than body mass index
The analysis presented this week by Raji and colleagues highlights the importance of good muscle health for improving overall health, according to Zhenqi Liu, a professor of diabetes at the University of Virginia, who was not involved in the study.
This highlights the limitations of people only taking into account their body mass index (BMI, or BMI, for its acronym in English) to review the state of their body health. BMI does not take into account how visceral or subcutaneous fat is distributed on someone’s body.
Therefore, even those who have a low BMI, that is, one that does not imply possible obesity or overweight, can have poor brain health if they do not take care of other aspects of their body, says Raji.
(These diets and physical exercises can help you reduce your ‘biological age’)
Liu suggests checking other body measurements to know the state of your health: the first is your waist circumference. Women with a measurement greater than 35 inches and men with a measurement greater than 40 inches have a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, according to the National Institute of Heart, Lung, and Blood Health.
The other measurement Liu suggests using is the hip-to-waist ratio: the waist circumference measurement should be divided by the hip circumference, and should be close to 0.85 for women or 0.9 for men for optimal health, according to the WHO.
Estimating visceral fat can be more complicated, because it requires tests such as MRI, which are often expensive. The good news is that at home you can take several actions to improve your muscle mass without making that expense.
How to build muscle and burn fat
“Anyone can start exercising regardless of age,” says Siddhartha Angadi, professor of kinesiology at the University of Virginia.
Angadi suggests following the American College of Sports Medicine’s guidelines, which urge people 65 and younger to do muscle-strengthening exercises at least twice a week.
This can be weight lifting or aerobic exercise, such as brisk walking. “It is advisable to do 10 to 15 different types of exercises and repeat each one up to three times, with about eight to 12 repetitions each,” according to Angadi. “Nothing can reverse brain aging, but it is possible to slow it down,” he added.
(Losing weight, even if you gain weight again, is good for your heart in the long term)
Starting small can go a long way toward building muscle and burning visceral fat, according to Glenn Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at Arizona State University.
“Many people believe that they have to exercise a lot to have any health benefits, but that is not necessarily the case,” Gaesser said, “just a few minutes is enough to significantly improve our health.”
For example, if you can’t do 150 minutes a week of aerobic exercise, your body does benefit from the first 30 minutes of that brisk walk or other type of cardio.
“The same goes for resistance training,” which involves lifting weights (or something equivalently heavy, like water bottles or cans of food), according to Gaesser.
“Many people can’t necessarily join a gym, but body weight can be enough to do certain exercises that help” such as squats or push-ups, he added.
Gaesser highlighted that when muscles exercise they release chemical signals that are considered to improve the state of the brain and other body tissues. “That’s why individuals who exercise regularly have a lower risk of cognitive decline, dementia, and Alzheimer’s. If you want to have a healthy brain, you need to have healthy muscles,” he said.
“In fact, physical fitness is basically the best predictor of whether someone will spend the final years of their life in a nursing home or not,” he said.
