Obesity and earlier Alzheimer’s

And how about this... just to stress us out?

Taken from the same place as yesterday's post; clearly I am cleaning off my desk - the September 18th print edition of the Week Magazine.

Medical experts have long suspected that obesity in midlife increases the risk for Alzheimer’s disease, but new research suggests that typical middle-age spread could also hasten the onset of the degenerative illness. A National Institutes of Health study found that people who are overweight at age 50 may be more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease sooner than their healthy-weight peers, CBSNews.com reports. The researchers tracked the body mass index (BMI)—the ratio of weight to height—of 142 people who eventually developed Alzheimer’s. They found symptoms of the disease appeared six and a half months earlier for every step up on the BMI chart. Lead author Madhav Thambisetty says the results could help provide clues about the cause of the brain-wasting disease, which has struck 46 million people worldwide. “Understanding how risk factors in midlife may accelerate the onset of Alzheimer’s,’’ he says, could speed “efforts to develop interventions and treatments.”