There is a growing theory that metabolic anomalies, as harming your wellness with diabetes, stroke and other conditions, can actually affect your mental wellbeing too. Now, using a neurodegeneration model of Alzheimer’s disease, researchers from Inserm and the Université Lille/Université Lille Nord de France have provided experimental evidence for the relationship between obesity and disorders linked to the tau protein.
Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders are the largest cause of age-related loss of intellectual function in France, as they affect 860,000 people. When you nerve cells are degenerating, they accumulate abnormal tau proteins which lead to cognitive impairment. Not only does obesity lead to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, but it also contributes to the risk of dementia during the aging process, though its effect on the tau protein-related disorders was not fully understood, and researchers, up until now, assumed it came down to insulin resistance.
However, this study, which is published in the Diabetes review, has demonstrated that obesity develops aggravated disorders in mice. The team, led by Dr. Luc Buée, put young transgenic mice which develop tau-related neurodegeneration progressively with age on a high-fat diet for five months, which lead to progressive obesity. David Blum, who is in charge of research at Inserm, explained, ‘At the end of this diet, the obese mice had developed an aggravated disorder both from the point of view of memory and modifications to the Tau protein’.
This research, which was supported by LabEx DISTALZ (development of Innovative Strategies for a Transdisciplinary Approach to Alzheimer’s Disease) within the framework of future investments, also indicates that insulin resistance is not the aggravating factor that previous studies thought it to be, but rather obesity, rather than the complications it causes, may be a factor in and of itself. This study used neurodenegeneration model of Alzheimer’s disease to prove this relationship between obesity and disorders linked to the tau protein.
‘Or research supports the theory that environmental factors contribute massively to the development of this neurodegenerative disorder,’ Blum underlined, and he concluded by saying ‘Our work is now focussing on identifying the factors responsible for this aggravation.’
Comments are closed.