• Posted November 27, 2024

Heart Trouble Harms Men's Brains Far Sooner Than Women's

Men with heart risk factors tend to lose their brain health more quickly than women with similar heart risks, a new study finds.

These men face brain decline as early as their mid-50s, while women are most susceptible from their mid-60s onward, researchers report in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

“These results suggest that mitigating cardiovascular risk is an important therapeutic target in the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, and indicate that this should be addressed aggressively a decade earlier in males than in females,” concluded the research team led by senior researcher Paul Edison, a professor of neuroscience with the Imperial College London.

Heart disease risk factors like type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and smoking have previously been associated with a higher risk of dementia, researchers said in background notes.

However, it’s not been clear when these heart health factors begin to take their toll on brain health, and whether there’s any differences between men and women, researchers noted.

For the study, researchers analyzed data on nearly 34,500 participants in the UK Biobank, an ongoing large-scale research project. 

Imaging scans helped track changes in the participants’ brains over time, and researchers calculated their heart disease risk using their recorded health data.

Results showed that heart risk factors, obesity and high levels of belly fat caused a gradual loss of brain volume over several decades for both men and women.

However, men became most susceptible to these damaging effects between 55 and 74, while women were most susceptible between 65 and 74.

This risk to brain health occurred whether or not the people carried the APOE4 gene, which increases a person’s likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

The brain regions most vulnerable to heart health risks were the temporal lobes, researchers said. These regions are involved in memory and the processing of hearing, vision and emotions, and are affected early in the development of dementia.

“The detrimental impact of cardiovascular risk was widespread … highlighting how cardiovascular risk can impair a range of cognitive functions,” the researchers said.

Overall, these results indicate that tackling heart health risks by controlling blood pressure, lowering cholesterol and blood sugar, exercising and quitting smoking could help preserve a person’s brain health.

Further, men appear to have more at stake than women, researchers noted.

“Modifiable cardiovascular risk factors, including obesity, deserve special attention in the treatment/prevention of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease,” researchers wrote. “This highlights the importance of aggressively targeting cardiovascular risk factors before the age of 55 years to prevent neurodegeneration and Alzheimer’s disease, in addition to the benefit of preventing other cardiovascular events such as myocardial infarction [heart attack] and stroke.”

More information

The American Heart Association has more about the brain effects of heart disease.

SOURCE: BMJ Group, news release, Nov. 26, 2024