Men with cardiovascular disease risk factors, including obesity, face brain health decline a decade earlier—from their mid 50s to mid 70s—than similarly affected women who are most susceptible from their mid 60s to mid 70s, suggest the findings of a long term study, published online in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry . The most vulnerable regions of the brain are those involved in processing auditory information, aspects of visual perception, emotional processing and memory, with the damaging effects just as evident in those who didn't carry the high risk APOE ε4 gene as those who did, the findings show. It's clear that cardiovascular disease risk factors , such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure , and smoking are associated with a heightened risk of developing dementia.
But when might be the best time to intervene with appropriate treatment to stave off the associated neurodegeneration, and whether this timing might differ between the sexes, isn't clear, say the researchers. To explore this further, they drew on 34,425 participants of the UK Biobank all of whom had had both abdominal and brain scans. Their average age was 63, but ranged from 45 to 82.
Cardiovascular disease risk was assessed using the Framingham Risk Score, which is based on: age; blood fats ; systolic blood pressure —the maximum arterial pressure exerted when the heart contracts and pumps blood, and represented by the first higher number in a reading—blood pressure .