Diabetes can age brain, but lifestyle changes may reverse it

Diabetes can age the brain by up to four years, a new study based on MRI scans shows.

There was one silver lining: Healthy lifestyle changes could help prevent that neurological aging, the Swedish researchers said.

"Having an older-appearing brain for one's chronological age can indicate deviation from the normal aging process and may constitute an early warning sign for dementia," warned study lead author Abigail Dove .

"On the positive side, it seems that people with diabetes may be able to influence their brain health through healthy living," added Dove, a graduate student of neurobiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Her team published its findings Wednesday in the journal Diabetes Care .

As Dove's group noted, Type 2 diabetes has long been acknowledged to be a risk factor for dementia. However, the impact of prediabetes and diabetes on the brain health of people without dementia wasn't known.

The new study sought to remedy that, analyzing MRI brain scans of over 31,000 people ages 40 to 70 who were all enrolled in a British database called the U.K. Biobank.

Dove and her colleagues used AI technology to gauge the relative "brain age" for each individual.

They found that folks whose medical records showed them to be in a prediabetic state had an average brain age that was half a year older than people without the condition.

For people with full-blown diabetes, brain age was an average of 2.3 years older, and for folks with very poorly controlled diabetes their brains were an average of four years older than folks without the blood sugar disease.

However, the study also found that people who were physically active and didn't smoke or drink were much less likely to have an overly aged brain.

"There's a high and growing prevalence of Type 2 diabetes in the population," Dove said in a Karolinska news release. "We hope that our research will help prevent cognitive impairment and dementia in people with diabetes and prediabetes."

More information

Find out more about the effects of diabetes on the brain at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .

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