By Times.am at 21 April, 2010, 11:08 am
New research from the US reveals that a common variant of the FTO obesity gene carried by more than one third of Americans that causes them to gain weight and puts them at risk for obesity, also leads to loss of brain tissue, thereby increasing their risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s later in life.
The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and private industry, appears in the early online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was led by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
UCLA researchers have found that FTO variant, which is also present in around one quarter of US Hispanics and in 15 per cent of African Americans and Asian Americans, is linked with a loss of brain tissue, placing around one third of the American population at higher risk of diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Senior author Dr Paul Thompson, a UCLA professor of neurology, and two graduate students from his lab, lead authors April Ho and Jason Stein, used magnetic resonance imaging to make 3D maps of the brains of 206 healthy elderly people from 58 US locations participating in the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, a large 5 year project that is looking at what helps the aging brain resist disease.
They found that participants who had the FTO variant had consistently less brain tissue than the non-carriers: 8 per cent less in frontal lobe tissue (the brain’s command and control centre) and 12 per cent less in occipital lobe tissue (the back part of the brain that controls vision and perception).
/Tert.am/
