A new study published in the Journal eLife compared patients with type 2 diabetes and patients with non-type 2 diabetes and found that this disease can significantly accelerate brain aging Although the pattern of neurodegeneration is similar to normal brain aging, the study found that in patients with diseases that can be largely prevented, its progression rate is about 26%.
In this first study, the researchers used the data set of the UK Biobank, especially the brain structure and function data of 20000 people aged 50 to 80. Using these data and comparing the results with a meta-analysis of nearly 100 other studies, the team was able to distinguish between age-related normal brain and cognitive changes and specific changes in type 2 diabetes.
They found that changes in executive functions, such as working memory, learning, flexible thinking and self-control, as well as decreased brain processing speed, were common in people with and without diabetes. However, compared with their peers without diabetes, the executive function of the former group decreased by an additional 13.1% and the processing speed decreased by an additional 6.7%.
When the team used MRI scans to analyze brain structure and activity, as expected, they found that gray matter decreased with age, with the largest reduction in the ventral striatum, a brain region crucial for executive function. But those with diabetes had another 6.2 percent reduction in gray matter in this area of the brain, as well as in other areas.
The results showed that there was a strong correlation between normal age-related neurodegeneration and type 2 diabetes related neurodegeneration, but the disease significantly accelerated the decline of cognitive ability. Moreover, the longer the duration of diabetes, the more obvious the impact on brain function. This study links the progress of diabetes with the acceleration of brain aging by about 26%. Although the mechanism responsible for the effect of the disease on the brain is unclear, the researchers do provide a hypothesis.
Lilianne Mujica Parodi, senior author of the study and director of the computational neurodiagnostic Laboratory of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said: "our results show that type 2 diabetes and its progression may be related to accelerated aging of the brain, and may be due to significant changes in brain structure and function caused by impaired energy supply."
She added that the results also show that the brain may have experienced significant structural damage before the formal diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, so more work needs to be done to identify brain based biomarkers of the disease and treatment strategies for its neurocognitive effects.
Botond Antal, the study's lead author, reinforced this view by saying: "routine clinical assessments for the diagnosis of diabetes usually focus on blood glucose, insulin levels and body weight percentage. However, the effects of type 2 diabetes on the nervous system may have been apparent many years before standard measures are detected, so when type 2 diabetes is diagnosed by routine tests, patients may have suffered irreversible brain damage."
The team's research was published in eLife 》In the magazine.