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Obesity / Weight Loss Story

Obesity and Dementia

Could your waistline be putting you at risk for dementia and even Alzheimer’s disease later in life? The list of problems that obesity can cause is long- heart disease, heartburn, diabetes and arthritis, to name a few. And now, according to new studies in the latest Archives of Internal Medicine, there’s evidence that being fat may be the reason for a loss in mental sharpness as we age. One study showed that individuals who were obese at midlife had an increased risk for dementia--a loss of cognitive abilities--later in life compared to individuals of normal weight.

Gisele Wolf-Klein, Chief of Geriatric Medicine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, says, "There is some strong correlation between vascular problems and dementia in general, probably because the circulation of the brain and the circulation to the neurons is affected." Obesity causes resistance to insulin, and frank diabetes, and that has been believed to be an important factor in the development of Alzheimer’s.

Still, even if you take the sugar, insulin and diabetes factor out of it, this study still found that, along with midlife obesity, high blood pressure and high total cholesterol level were all significant risk factors for dementia, each one increasing the risk around two times. In fact, a person with all three of these had around a six times higher risk for dementia than those with none of these risk factors.

Carissa Romano’s grandfather might be a good example. He’s suffering from severe Alzheimer’s now. "You have to learn how to say goodbye and remember the person they once were, because the next day he won’t be the same man he was yesterday," says Carissa. She now cares for Alzheimer’s patients; and like her grandfather, many of the patients might have dementia in part because of poor diet and obesity. "His diet wasn’t the healthiest. He liked his cakes, and his candies and he was overweight in his 40s and even now when he’s 85," says Carissa.

Another study in the same journal says it’s the abdominal obesity--that spare tire--which is doing the damage, perhaps because that increased fat is somehow causing a shrinking of a part of the brain called the hippocampus.

The research found the greater the waist to hip ratio, the smaller the hippocampus. Hippocampal shrinking is highly associated with Alzheimer’s. The excess fat is thought to perhaps cause stress on the body, which affects hormones produced by parts of the brain called the hypothalamus, and the pituitary, as well as the adrenal gland, and these in turn may affect the hippocampus, causing it to shrink. It’s all speculation, but a plausible theory as to why fat causes a key part of the brain to shrink.

So now the question is, what can we do about it? "We are not sure if you reduce your weight or change your diets you will actually prevent dementia. There is no study that tells us this," says Dr. Wolf-Klein. At least not yet. But that doesn’t change the fact that, for many other reasons, it’s better to be of normal weight, than obese.

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