More weight may equal less brainpower

Older women hoping to keep their minds young should keep an eye on the scale researchers have found a link between slowing down mentally and piling on the kilos.....

Older women hoping to keep their minds young should keep an eye on the scale researchers have found a link between slowing down mentally and piling on the kilos.

For every extra point gained on a scale of obesity,scores in reasoning,memory and other mental skills fell,found Dr Diana Kerwin of Northwestern University in Chicago and colleagues. What we found is that actually obesity in and of itself is an independent risk factor for declining cognitive performance, she said.

Using data from the Womens Health Initiative,an ongoing national study of illness and death among older women,she compared womens body mass index,or BMI, to their results on a test that measured their mental sharpness.

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The test evaluated memory,abstract reasoning,writing,and temporal and spatial orientation skills of the group of women aged 65 to 79. Among the 8,745 women who completed the test,for each point increase in BMI,scores on the mental test went down by one point,Kerwins team reported in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.

While the womens scores were still in the normal range,the added weight definitely had a detrimental effect, she said. Even if you do have normal blood pressure and are not diabetic,it still should be something thats looked at as an independent risk factor for your brain health.

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