Being fat in middle age reduces risk of dementia, says new study

Not a happy predicament, though.

By Raif Karerat

WASHINGTON, DC:A new study has flown directly in the face of established research and conventional wisdom by finding being fat in middle age lowers the risk of developing dementia as opposed to increasing it.

The study of two million people, published in the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology Journal, surmised that underweight people were far more likely to develop dementia.

Underweight people had a 34 percent higher risk of developing dementia than those of a normal weight, the study found, while the very obese had a 29 percent lower risk of becoming forgetful and confused and showing other signs of senility.

A 2008 study of 6,000 people published in the Neurology journal and cited by the Washington Post found that people who have big bellies in their ’40s were much more likely to get Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia in their ’70s.

But the new research “overshadows those (previous studies) by orders of magnitude,” said Nawab Qizilbash of Oxon Epidemiology, who led the study. “We show completely the opposite,” Qizilbash told the Times of London.

Participants in the study had a mean age of 55 and 45,507 of them developed dementia over an average of 9 years. The risk of dementia fell steadily as their weight rose, the researchers found.

“If we can understand why people with a high body mass index have a reduced risk of dementia, it’s possible that further down the line, researchers might be able to use these insights to develop new treatments,” said Stuart Pocock, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to the Times.

Qizilbash advised that being overweight brings with it a much higher risk of death from any given condition as well as higher risk of stroke, heart conditions, and other diseases, such as diabetes and certain types of cancer, which the Centers for Disease Control name as some of the leading causes of preventable death.

“So even if there is a protective effect against dementia from being overweight or obese, you’re not living long enough to benefit from it,” Qizilbash informed the English news outlet.

A research article published by the Journal of American Medicine in 2014 indicated at least 34.9 percent of U.S. adults are designated as obese, which equates to more than 78.6 million people.