OBESITY DIMINISHES MEMORY

Obesity subtly diminishes memory and other features of thinking and reasoning even among seemingly healthy people, and international team of scientists reports. At least some of these impairments appear reversible through weight loss.  Researchers' also report one likely mechanism for those cognitive deficits: damage to the wiring that links the brain's information processing regions.

A number of studies in recent years have shown that individuals with diseases linked to obesity, including cardiovascular disease, hyper tension and type 2 diabetes don't score as well on cognitive tests as less hefty individual do.  To test whether weight alone and not disease might be partially responsible, John Gunstad of Ken State University in Ohio, United State of America, and his colleagues recruited 150 obese individuals for a series of cognitive tests.  These people weighed on average just under 300 pounds, although some were substantially heavier .  Two-third would shortly undergo weight loss surgery.

Scores on the tests were assessed against those of people in the Brain Resources international Database, a larger multi-center project with date on very healthy people ind. Obese individuals in the new study initially performed on the low end of the normal range for healthy individuals from the database on average, Gunstad stays, although nearly one-quarter of the obese participants scores on memory and learning actually fell within what researchers consider the impaired range.

Tested again 12 weeks after bariatric surgery – when most had shed some 50 pounds – the lighter but still heavy patients scored substantially better. Most now performed within the average or greater than average range for all cognitive tests", the researchers report online in surgery for Obesity and Related Disease. Study participants who didn't have surgery – or lose weight performed worse on the second test.  That was a bit surprising" Gunstad says: Neurologist Stefan Knecht of the University of Germany, who is not involved in the new research, says he is not surprised that the untreated participants experienced rapid continuing, continuing drops in cognitive performance.  Among the morbidly obese, he says "you can actually watch them getting worse from one three month period to the next if you have sufficiently sensitive measure, which  Gunstad's group did".