4 years younger
The female brain ages slower than the male
Yulia Vorobyova, Vesti
As the human brain ages, some changes occur with it. For example, his metabolism changes with age. And, as it turned out, these processes occur differently in men and women.
According to new data obtained by a team from the University of Washington School of Medicine, men and women of the same actual age have a significant difference: the brain of the former is several years "older" than the brain of the latter "in the metabolic sense."
Let's explain that the human brain uses sugar for energy production. But at different ages, he "burns fuel" in different ways. Infants and children have a pronounced metabolic process called aerobic glycolysis, which supports the growth and development of the brain. The rest of the glucose serves as a fuel for everyday tasks – thinking, memorizing, and so on.
However, changes occur at a young, mature and elderly age. The brain continues to use sugar for cognitive functions, but the level of aerobic glycolysis decreases over the years.
The researchers decided to check whether the metabolic processes taking place in the brains of men and women are different. The test involved 121 women and 84 men aged 20 to 82 years.
They underwent positron emission tomography (PET) to measure oxygen flow and glucose consumption in the brain. Experts determined for each patient the proportion of sugar released for aerobic glycolysis in various parts of the brain
Then the authors of the work resorted to a machine learning algorithm. First, they uploaded data on the age and metabolism of the men's brains into the system and trained the algorithm to determine the first indicator based on the second.
Next, the scientists introduced information about the metabolism of the brain of women and set the program the task of calculating the age of each participant. The results showed that the female brain was on average 3.8 years "younger" than the women themselves according to the passport.
To test the results, the researchers repeated the same steps in reverse order. They "from scratch" trained an algorithm based on female indicators, and then introduced male ones. The system decided that the men's brains were "older" than themselves, although the difference was slightly less than the previous one – 2.4 years.
It is noteworthy that such results were observed even among young participants who were slightly over 20.
"It's not that men's brains age faster. They begin adulthood about three years earlier than women, and this persists throughout life," says the lead author of the work Manu Goyal.
According to his team, the data obtained may explain why men's cognitive abilities deteriorate faster with age and why they suffer from neurodegenerative diseases more often than women.
In addition, it was previously found that the age-related decrease in the volume of gray matter occurs faster in the brain of men than in the brain of women. It is also known that gene expression in the brain changes faster in aging men than in women.
All these differences, their nature and the mechanisms associated with them should be studied in more detail, since these are potential risk factors for dangerous senile diseases, the researchers believe. At the next stage, they intend to determine whether the "metabolic youth" of the brain can protect it from cognitive impairment.
More details about this work are described in an article published in the journal PNAS (Goyal et al., Persistent metabolic youth in the aging female brain).
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