Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 11/23/2009 10:31:36 AM PST by decimon
Women who store fat on their waist in middle age are more than twice as likely to develop dementia when they get older, reveals a new study from the Sahlgrenska Academy.
The study has just been published in the scientific journal Neurology.
"Anyone carrying a lot of fat around the middle is at greater risk of dying prematurely due to a heart attack or stroke," says Deborah Gustafson, senior lecturer at the Sahlgrenska Academy. "If they nevertheless manage to live beyond 70, they run a greater risk of dementia."
The research is based on the Prospective Population Study of Women in Gothenburg, which was started at the end of the 1960s when almost 1,500 women between the ages of 38 and 60 underwent comprehensive examinations and answered questions about their health and lifestyle.
A follow-up 32 years later showed that 161 women had developed dementia, with the average age of diagnosis being 75. This study shows that women who were broader around the waist than the hips in middle age ran slightly more than twice the risk of developing dementia when they got old. However, the researchers could find no link to a high body mass index (BMI).
"Other studies have shown that a high BMI is also linked to dementia, but this was not the case in ours," says Gustafson. "This may be because obesity and overweight were relatively unusual among the women who took part in the Prospective Population Study."
The study was carried out at the Neuropsychiatric Epidemiology Research Unit as part of the Sahlgrenska Academy's major research project EpiLife.
DEMENTIA
The most common symptoms of dementia are forgetfulness, impaired speech and problems with recognition and orientation. It is a condition that can affect all our mental faculties and which is more common as we get older. Around seven per cent of the Swedish population over the age of 65 and just over 20 per cent of the over-80s have severe dementia.
For more information, please contact:
Senior lecturer Deborah Gustafson, mobile: +46 76 880 88 65, e-mail
Journal: Neurology
Title of article: Adiposity indicators and dementia over 32 years in Sweden
Authors: D.R. Gustafson, K. Bäckman, M. Waern, S. Östling, X. Guo, P. Zandi, M.M. Mielke, C. Bengtsson and I. Skoog
DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0b013e3181c0d4b6
Neurology. 10 Nov 2009; 73: 1559-1566.
BY: Elin Lindström Claessen
read
Liposuction should be considered preventative treatment for senility.
Bummer.
Most people go through life doing what they have to do and doing what they want. Pleeze....If I'm not harming someone else...Leave me alone!!!
How does a woman get broader around the waist and not the hips?
No wonder my ex turned into a psychotic wench.
I wonder...those experts who recommended fewer mammograms and pap smears....are they obese? Otherwise, how do we explain such stupid recommendations?
Then abdominalplasty and liposuction should be considered medically necessary and covered by insurance.
Childbirth, perhaps.
Crapola... my little neighbor elderly lady walking the neighborhood is thin as a rail but senility is setting in despite her exercise and low fat content. My mom who is 10 years older and a bit on the heavy side has all her marbles.
I’m so sick of these articles that give 1/2 the story. It’s not the fat that causes the dementia. It’s the hormoneal imbalances that cause the fat around the abdomen. Imbalanced hormones royally screw up a body. The crazy erratic behavior is just one side effect.
That’s pregnancy, not obesity.
Gee, nice to know. My maternal relatives were all round around the belly, lived into their 80s and 90s and suffered dementia only in the last couple of years of their lives, some not at all. More BS.
Fat between the ears is a bigger problem.
(1) Fat distribution is more important than overall obesity, adiposity, BMI, or whatever. Fat neck, fat butt, not too much of a health problem. Fat middle: that's the killer.
(2) A number of things affect fat distribution--- genetics is a big one --- and sometimes it is not even responsive to stuff like exercise or weight loss. Meaning: you could lose a lot of weight and exercise your abs like crazy, and still end up looking like a skinny bean pod with one bean right in the middle! with a bad waist-hip ratio.
(3) Call belly fat "A", call dementia "B", call other factors (genetics, diet, indiagnosed allergies or infections or metabolic disorders of some kind) "C".
We don't know whether A causes B, or B causes A, or A and B are both caused by C.
In other words, belly fat may cause dementia, OR dementia may cause belly fat, OR, there may be some other factor in there that's causing BOTH A and B.
Confusing, eh?
That's why I hope somebody else will jump into the discussion and tell us more.
In line with some other replies, I would guess the last.
I have been losing in my upper and lower body, but the middle keeps hanging on. It so explains my craziness.
[Zsa Zsa Gabor voice] You're not crazy, you're Hungarian, dahling. ;-)
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