Preventing cognitive decline is an important step towards healthy aging, and now new research has shown the critical age to pay more attention to care to maintain cerebral health. Published in PNAS magazine in early March, the study brought new perceptions about when interventions to prevent cognitive decline can be more effective.
To this end, the team of researchers analyzed functional communication between brain regions in more than 19,300 individuals in four large -scale data sets. Your discoveries They reveal that these brain nets degrade in a nonlinear way, with clear transition points.
According to the researchers, the effect on the brain is first seen around 44 years, with degeneration reaching the acceleration peak around 67 and stabilizing around 90 years.
“Understanding exactly when and how brain aging accelerates us gives us strategic time points for intervention,” says Lilianne R. Mujica-Parodi, the main author of the study, in communication. “We have identified a middle-aged critical window where the brain begins to experience decreasing access to energy, but before irreversible damage occur, essentially ‘curvature’ before ‘break’. During middle age, neurons are metabolically stressed due to fuel insufficiency; They are fighting, but they are still viable, ”she explains.
Given this discovery, researchers find it important to “provide an alternative fuel” during this critical window to restore brain function and thus prevent cognitive decline.
Resistance of insulin neurons can be a factor for cognitive decline
According to the researchers, the main factor for brain aging may be neuronal resistance to insulin. By comparing metabolic, vascular and inflammatory biomarkers, they found that metabolic changes (such as insulin resistance itself) preceded vascular and inflammatory changes.
Genetic expression analyzes further implied the glucose glucose carrier glut4 and APOE lipid carrier (a well -known Alzheimer’s risk factor) in these aging patterns.
On the other hand, these same genetic analyzes identified a neuronal ketone carrier called MCT2, which can function as a protector of cognition. This suggests that increasing the brain’s ability to use ketones – an alternative brain fuel that neurons can metabolize without insulin – can be beneficial.
These findings encouraged another study, in which researchers compared the administration of glucose and ketones dosed individually to 101 participants who were in different stages of aging.
In this new study, ketones stabilized the deterioration of brain nets, unlike glucose. Ketons showed moderate benefits in young adults (20-39 years), showed maximum benefits during the period of middle-aged “metabolic stress” (40-59 years), after which the networks began to destabilize, but had a decreased impact on older adults (60-79 years) since the destabilization of the network has reached maximum acceleration and the domain of composed vascular effects.
Mujica-Parodi and study co-authors say that these findings can revolutionize approaches to prevent cognitive decline related to age and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
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Was this content originally published as when to prevent cognitive decline? Study responds on CNN Brazil.
Source: CNN Brasil
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