If you’re keeping score in America’s ongoing discussion on gender equality, here’s a win in the women’s column that you may not have seen coming: New research suggests women’s brains are about four years “younger” than men’s of the same age, and as they age, they’ll remain mentally sharp for longer than if they were men.
The findings are especially promising to researchers studying neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s with new insight into how gender may affect how brains age, says Dr. Manu S. Goyal, an assistant professor radiology and neurology at Washington University in St. Louis and the lead author of the study.
The research, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, could help doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s disease earlier and improve patients’ quality of life, but also potentially lead to treatments to slow the progression fo the disease.
The aim of the research isn’t to find ways to stop brain aging, but to “understand is how brain aging contributes to diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, and why some people are more or less resilient to developing Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases,” Goyal wrote in an email to CNN.
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Scientists already know sex differences in the brain can change how men and women respond to stress, for example, and there’s nothing new about findings that female brains are more youthful than male brains.
But until now, scientists have only been able to study postmortem brain analyses, often with contradictory results.
The new study focused on PET scans of 205 cognitively healthy men and women, ages 20 to 82, measuring glucose use, oxygen consumption and blood flow in the brain.
“We used a ‘machine learning’ technique to ‘guess’ at how old each of our study participants was based only on their brain metabolism,” Goyal told CNN. “We found that the technique ‘guessed’ quite well, but often predicted a person’s age to be more or less than their actual age.”
For their study, Goyal and his colleagues looked at metabolism rather than birth date. The research participants all underwent PET scans to measure the flow of oxygen and glucose sugar, a pattern of intake that can change with age.
The scientists fund that metabolic and chronological age tracked fairly consistently in both men and women. But metabolically speaking, female brains were an average of 3.8 years younger than male brains of the same chronological age.
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And that’s not all — regardless of whether a woman is say, 30 or 80, female brains are younger than men’s by an average of 3.8 years.
“It’s not that men’s brains age faster — they start adulthood about three years older than women, and that persists throughout life,” Goyal told Yahoo News.
“What we don’t know is what it means. I think this could mean that the reason women don’t experience as much cognitive decline in later years is because their brains are effectively younger, and we’re currently working on a study to confirm that.”
While more research is needed to better understand brain aging, Goyal is hope the work will lead to better treatments for Alzheimer’s, which he told CNN is “a major growing problem in the United States and elsewhere.”
“Certainly, diet and exercise might be part of the equation here and we and others are planning to study this and how body metabolism in general influences brain metabolism in healthy aging and in disease,” he said.
The size and scope of the study is one of its strengths, Samuel Neal Lockhart, an assistant professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine at North Carolina’s Wake Forest School of Medicine told CNN. Lockhart was not involved in the study, but has researched the role of vascular and metabolic disorders in the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
The researchers collected an “immense amount of data … to convincingly show that no matter how you look at it, males have more accelerated metabolic brain age,” Lockhart told CNN.
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