Belly Fat at 40: Dementia At 70

Does that impressive girth that surrounds your middle bring to mind any of the following attributes? Bagel belly, central obesity, or maybe just “mass enhanced?” If so, and if you are over 40, you may be unintentionally setting yourself up for Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia by the time you reach age 70.

If you suffer from “girth imbalance,” you certainly are not alone. It is estimated that 50 percent of adult Americans carry unhealthy supplies of fat around their middles. Excess fat, particularly around the middle, can lead to a higher risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and early death. Researchers have now concluded that that creeping middle age belly fat also predisposes us to the risk of developing Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

Dementia is an age-related disease that robs its victims of memory and cognitive functions; things like perception, reasoning, judgment, thinking, and speech. One in ten Americans over the age of 65 suffers from some form of dementia; 60 to 80 percent suffer its most common form, Alzheimer’s disease.

In a study that spanned more than forty years (1964 – 2006), and the results of which appeared in the March, 2008, online edition of the Journal of Neurology, researchers led by Rachel Whitmer at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California, took the belly measurements of 6,583 adult men and women when they were between the ages of 40 and 45. Approximately 36 years later, when the participants were 73 to 87 years old, 1,049 of those people, close to 16 percent, had developed either Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia.

Participants who had a parent or a sibling with a history of dementia were twice as likely to develop the disease by age 70 than were participants who had no such relatives. However, the more startling conclusion was that belly fat actually mattered more than heredity, as a risk factor, in the development of dementia.

Those people, who in their middle years carried excess belly fat, were four times more likely to develop dementia by age 70 than were people whose belly fat measurements had been low during their middle years.

Comparing an obese person with a person of normal weight, both of whom had low belly fat measurements in their 40's, the obese person was 81 percent more likely to develop dementia by age 70 than the normal weight person was; and if they both had had high belly fat measurements in their 40's, then the obese person was 3.6 times more likely to develop dementia by age 70.

Those people with the highest amount of abdominal fat in their 40s were almost three times more likely to develop dementia in their 70s than were participants with the lowest belly fat measurements.

Abdominal fat is becoming known as the most dangerous kind of fat to carry. The good news is that belly fat is easier than other kinds of fat to get off. It is the first fat that comes off with diet and exercise.

The good news: Thigh fat didn’t seem to pose any health risk in this study. See you at the gym!