A recent study suggests that people with diabetes and prediabetes face an increased risk of accelerated brain aging. However, there is a silver lining: A healthy lifestyle can offset these effects. Researchers now say that by staying physically active, avoiding smoking and drinking alcohol in moderation, the effects on the brain can be significantly mitigated.
Although diabetes is known to increase the risk of dementia, its exact effects on brain aging remain unclear. The latest study, published in Diabetes Care, investigated how prediabetes and diabetes affect brain aging in people without dementia. The study noted that men and people with poor cardiometabolic health aged particularly fast.
The researchers used machine learning to estimate brain age from MRI scans (magnetic resonance imaging) of 31,000 participants in the UK Biobank, aged between 40 and 70. All participants did not have dementia and underwent up to two brain scans during an 11-year follow-up.
The analysis showed that prediabetes was associated with an increase in brain age of 0.5 years, and diabetes was associated with an increase in brain age of 2.3 years. The brains of people with uncontrolled diabetes looked more than four years older than their actual age.
“The association between prediabetes and higher BAG (brain age minus chronological age) was more pronounced in males and those with two or more cardiometabolic risk factors. In the combined exposure analysis, a healthy lifestyle (i.e., no smoking, no alcohol abuse, and high physical activity) significantly attenuated the association between diabetes and BAG,” the researchers wrote.
“If a person’s brain age appears older than their chronological age, it suggests that the aging process has deviated from normal, which could be an early warning sign of dementia,” Abigail Dove of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, the study’s lead author, said in a news release.
However, Dove said there is also a positive side to the study, suggesting that people with diabetes can improve their brain health by leading a healthy lifestyle.
Diabetes is a chronic metabolic disease that affects approximately one in ten people worldwide, a number that is expected to rise to 643 million by 2030. As of 2021, an estimated 720 million people are living with prediabetes, a number that is expected to increase by 11% by 2045.
“The prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the population is high and growing. We hope our research will help prevent cognitive impairment and dementia in people with diabetes and prediabetes,” Dove added.