Can obesity harm the memory of women?
July 15th 2010 23:54
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Alyssa Sparacino - link provided
What goes up must come down.
A new study finds that as an older woman's BMI goes up her memory function simultaneously goes down.
The research team led by Dr. Diane Kerwin, an assistant professor of medicine and a physician at Northwestern Medicine, found that overweight post-menopausal women, particularly those who carry their fat around their hips, saw an increased decline in memory.
"The message is obesity and a higher body mass index are not good for your cognition and your memory," Kerwin said in a statement. "While the women's scores were still in the normal range, the added weight definitely had a detrimental effect."
The findings come from the Women's Health Initiative hormone trials and are the first in the country to illustrate the connection between pear-shaped women, obesity and memory loss.
Kerwin and colleagues controlled for outside health variable like diabetes, heart disease and stroke in their 8,745 female participants and found the women with more belly fat, or apple-shaped bodies, did better on the assigned memory test.
Dr. Laura Corio, AOL Health's women's health expert, said this was the first time she's seen a study that favored apple-shaped women, as those body types are typically associated with an increased risk for conditions such as cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure.
"It's always been that the apple shape is detrimental to women, so I find it strange that the pear-shaped women are the ones getting into trouble," said Corio, who is a New York City obstetrician-gynecologist. "It just doesn't make sense to me."
Corio also expressed concern about the participants' demographics as she said that age is a major factor in memory loss and many of these women could have the beginnings of dementia or Alzheimer's disease, either of which could have contributed to the results.
"I also find it weird that [the researchers] found that many older women who were pear-shaped, because as women go through menopause they gain weight in their belly," she told AOL Health.
The study, which appears in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, theorizes that pear-shaped women had worse results because where fat is stored affects what type of cognition-altering hormones are released.
"Obesity is bad, but its effects are worse depending on where the fat is located," Kerwin said. "We need to find out if one kind of fat is more detrimental than the other, and how it affects brain function. The fat may contribute to the formation of plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease or a restricted blood flow to the brain."
Corio says though more information is needed in order to debunk or confirm the findings, what she is certain of is the need for Americans to get fit.
"Women in general and men in general in this country...there is a lot of obesity," she said to AOL Health. "And they should thin down, but not only because of memory but because of all the health risks."
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