Overweight people ages 10 years faster than lean people... check out why....

Health: According to  a research by the University of Cambridge, it found out that the brains of obese people age more quickly than those of slimmer people in middle age.

Researchers found out that the brains of obese people shows dissimilarities in white matter similar to those in thinner individuals 10 years older.

White matter is the tissue that connects several areas of the brain and allows information to be communicated between regions.

Human brains naturally shrink with age, but researchers are increasingly acknowledging that obesity which is already connected to conditions such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease may also affect the begining and progression of brain ageing.

Researchers looked at the influence of obesity on brain structure across the adult life span in a study of 473 people aged between 20 and 87.

Candidates were employed by the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience and the results published in the journal Neurobiology of Ageing.

The researchers categorized the data into two groups: lean and overweight.
The researchers discovered striking differences in the volume of white matter in overweight people.

In overweight individuals, there is a widespread reduction in white matter compared to lean people.

The team then calculated how white matter volume related to age across the two groups and discovered that an overweight person at 50 had a comparable white matter volume to a lean person aged 60.

The researchers only observed these differences from middle-age onwards, indicating that brains may be particularly defenless during this period of ageing.

"As our brains age, they naturally shrink in size, but it isn't clear why people who are overweight have a greater reduction in the amount of white matter," said Dr Lisa Ronan from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge.

"We can only speculate on whether obesity might in some way cause these changes or whether obesity is a consequence of brain changes."

The researchers couldn't find any link between being overweight or obese and an individual's cognitive abilities, as measured using a standard test similar to an IQ test.
The report's co-author, from the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Institute of Metabolic Science at Cambridge, Professor Sadaf Farooqi said:

"We don't yet know the implications of these changes in brain structure.

"Clearly, this must be a starting point for us to explore in more depth the effects of weight, diet and exercise on the brain and memory."

The research was supported by the Bernard Wolfe Health Neuroscience Fund, the Wellcome Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.