Changing habits can slow down brain aging

by time news

A study by the Neurovascular Research Group of the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute, published by the journal “Biology”, has made it possible for the first time to associate a more advanced biological age with the presence of an indicator of brain aging, the hyperintensities of the white matter, areas of the brain where blood reaches with more difficulty.

Life habits influence the configuration of the ADN and determine the biological age. If these habits are modified, the aging of the DNA can be slowed down and, therefore, the biological age, thus slowing down the increase of white matter hyperintensities in brain tissue.

These are areas of the brain that appear differently in magnetic resonance images and indicate that it is a tissue where blood reaches with more difficulty.

“A good part of the effect of the passing of the years on our brain is not only given by the chronological age, which we have by our date of birth, but by the biological age, which explains many other things than just the chronological one”, points the Jordi Jimenez-Condecoordinator of the research group, attending physician of the Hospital del Mar Neurology Department and author of the work.

The study opens the door to having new tools to improve the prognosis and follow-up of patients, thus making it possible to identify with a blood test which individuals will have a greater tendency to present accelerated brain aging.

The biological age that can be measured in specific blood tests is marked by our lifestyles

The researchers have worked with data from 247 patients who had suffered a stroke and who underwent a magnetic resonance imaging that made it possible to establish the volume of hyperintensities of the white matter in their brains. On the other hand, the biological age was determined in blood samples, by analyzing the degree of methylation of their DNA, which is modified based on external factors, such as life habits. In this way, it was possible to demonstrate for the first time how “biological age, the aging of the body, has a direct association with brain aging independently of chronological age,” explains Jiménez Conde.

In fact, biological age would explain 42.7% of brain aging measured by the presence of white matter hyperintensities. As Joan Jiménez-Balado, postdoctoral researcher of the Neurovascular Research Group of the IMIM-Hospital del Mar and author of the study, explains, “we must continue studying the effect that the genetic about these brain lesions, as it can help us better understand the biological mechanisms involved in brain aging. In the same way, it will be very interesting in future studies to use the new computational approximations that allow us to classify the hyperintensities of the white matter based on aspects such as its location and see if, for example, it happens that we are considering these lesions as a whole when in fact different causes are associated with them depending on the space they occupy”.

In this sense, a high presence of white matter hyperintensity is associated with various pathologies, such as non-specific cognitive impairment, gait disturbances and a worse prognosis in the brain’s ability to recover from any pathology that affects it. Its volume increases with age and is not reversible. But it is possible to act on biological age and slow down the aging of DNA with changes in our lifestyles, a fact that can have an impact on slowing down the increase in these lesions in brain tissue with a slowdown in brain aging.

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