A new study from researchers at Princeton University shows that obesity can negatively affect brainpower, Science News reports.
The researchers, Elise C. Cope, Elizabeth A. LaMarca, Patrick K. Monari, Lyra B. Olson, Susana Martinez, Anna D. Zych, Nicole J. Katchur and Elizabeth Gould, wrote in the Journal of Neuroscience that “one of the lesser known consequences of obesity is its deleterious effects on cognition, an effect that has been well-documented across many cognitive domains and age groups.”
The researchers fed mice a high-fat diet for 12 weeks “to investigate the cellular mechanisms that underlie obesity-associated cognitive decline… and found memory impairments along with reductions in dendritic spines, sites of excitatory synapses, increases in the activation of microglia, the brain's resident immune cells, and increases in synaptic profiles within microglia, in the hippocampus, a brain region linked to cognition.”
Mice who were fed a high-fat diet were worse at navigating mazes and remembering the locations of objects compared to mice that ate a standard diet. Multiple studies have found that obese people have a higher risk for dementias like Alzheimer’s, which some researchers attribute to microglia.
The Princeton study also found that “Inhibition of microglial activation by transgenic and pharmacological methods prevented cognitive decline and dendritic spine loss in obese mice. Moreover, pharmacological inhibition of the phagocytic activity of microglia was also sufficient to prevent cognitive degradation. This work suggests that microglia may be responsible for obesity-associated cognitive decline and dendritic spine loss.”
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