[ad_1]
"Boys will be boys" says the old saying, but girls could have the last word.
Researchers report that women's brains tend to age more slowly.
Glucose and oxygen
On average, women's brains appear to be about three years younger than men of the same chronological age. This could provide a clue as to why women tend to stay mentally intense longer than men, the authors noted.
"Women tend to perform better on cognitive testing than men with age," said Dr. Manu Goyal, Principal Investigator, Adjunct Professor at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in Washington. St. Louis. "It's possible that the discovery we're seeing helps to explain some of that."
Scientists have observed that people's brains change structure and function as they age.
One change concerns how the brain uses sugar and oxygen to fuel its efforts, Goyal said.
"The brain really depends on glucose and oxygen to meet its metabolic needs, and it is a very big consumer of these resources," Goyal said. "The way he uses glucose and oxygen, and in what parts of the brain he uses the most, changes with age, in general."
Goyal and his colleagues first investigated whether a computer program could use this brain metabolism scheme to predict the age of a person. The program worked very well, but he made some mistakes. The research team is therefore responsible for reporting these errors.
Relative youth of the female brain
The researchers recruited 205 people aged 20 to 82 years for brain imaging that measured the flow of oxygen and sugar into their brains. These data were then introduced into the computer program.
"We looked at women and men, and when we started looking at it, we were pleasantly surprised to find that when the machine was trying to age a woman versus a man, she was consistently younger than she was. man, "said Goyal.
"On average, it was found that women appeared to be younger than men in terms of the metabolic age of the brain and the structure of brain metabolism," he said.
The team first formed the algorithm by giving it age and brain metabolism, and then data on brain metabolism in women. Based on the male reference, the algorithm estimated women's brains an average 3.8 years younger than their actual age.
The researchers then tried to use a female reference with the age and metabolism of women's brains. Similarly, the algorithm estimated that men's brains were, on average, 2.4 years older than their actual age.
The relative youth of female brains was detectable even when comparing men and women in their twenties, the researchers said.
Changes during puberty
"It's not that women's brains seem to age more slowly than men's," Goyal said. "On the contrary, it seems that the brains of women start at a younger age when they reach adulthood, and they retain it for the rest of their adult lives, buying them essentially a few extra years."
Researchers suspect that women gain this advantage during puberty, Goyal said.
"As women and men enter puberty, the way their brains evolve is very different," said Goyal. "Men, their blood flow to the brain decreases a little as they go through puberty.In women, it does not decrease as much.In fact, it could drop and then go up.The differences in treatment between a woman and a man the brain of a man who develops during puberty sets the stage for his subsequent aging. "
However, Goyal noted that these effects are relatively small and that at this stage they can not be used to directly explain the different changes in mental acuity that occur during aging.
"Dementia is such a complex process," said Goyal. "It could mean that women are a little more resilient to some aspects of brain aging in general, but it could also introduce some vulnerabilities, having a younger brain longer could make it more vulnerable to certain things. be careful not to speculate on what that means in terms of downstream dementia and so on. "
In fact, brain metabolism might have little to do with diseases like Alzheimer's or dementia, said Dr. Gayatri Devi, a neurologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
Increased risk of Alzheimer's disease
"The typical female brain is more energetically young than the typical male brain throughout life.This difference is present even in the brains exhibiting amyloid plaques seen in Alzheimer's disease, although none of the people did not show any clinical symptoms, "said Devi says new discoveries. She was not part of the study.
"Despite this relative cerebral youth, women, however, are at a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease than men," said Devi. "Estrogen, which increases the vitality of brain regions involved in memory but which collapses after menopause in women, may be a factor, although many other factors are likely to be involved."
The study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Image credit: iStock
[ad_2]
Source link
