(CNN) — Inflammation from belly fat may be linked to the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease decades before symptoms begin, new research has found.
“We’ve known for a while that as the belly size gets larger, the memory centers in the brain get smaller,” said Alzheimer’s disease researcher Dr. Richard Isaacson, a preventive neurologist at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases of Florida.
“This study shows a brain imaging marker of neuroinflammation which I had not seen before,” said Isaacson, who was not involved in the new study. “The brain imaging links the belly fat, or visceral fat, to the brain dysfunction through an inflammatory cascade.”
The study found individuals in their 40s and 50s with a greater amount of hidden belly fat “had a higher amount of an abnormal protein called amyloid in a part of the brain that we know is one of the earliest places where Alzheimer’s occurs,” said senior author Dr. Cyrus Raji, associate professor of radiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Beta-amyloid plaques in the brain are one of the hallmark signals of Alzheimer’s, along with tangles of a protein called tau. Amyloid plaques typically appear first, with tau tangles arriving later as the disease progresses.
“There’s a sex difference, as well, where the men had a higher relationship between their belly fat and amyloid than women,” Raji said. “The reason that’s important is because men have more visceral fat than women.”
The study also found a relationship between deep belly fat and brain atrophy, or wasting away of gray matter, in a part of the brain’s memory center called the hippocampus.
“That’s important because brain atrophy is another biomarker of Alzheimer’s disease,” Raji said.
The brain’s gray matter contains the majority of brain cells that tell the body what to do. White matter is made up of fibers, typically distributed into bundles called tracts, which form connections between brain cells and the rest of the nervous system.
“We also found that the individuals with higher amounts of visceral fat tend to have more inflammation in widespread white matter tracks in the brain,” said lead author Dr. Mahsa Dolatshahi, a postdoctoral research fellow at Washington University School of Medicine.
Without a functional white matter highway, the brain cannot adequately communicate with different parts of the brain and the body.
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