Rhelyn Harder
- The brain uses sugar for cognitive functions but as we approach adulthood the process of aerobic glycolysis stage continues to slow down and decline
- Aerobic glycolysis is a metabolic process that appears heavily in children who increasingly sync with the synaptic formation and growth
- It’s not that men’s brains age faster – they start adulthood about three years ahead of women and that persists throughout life
Did you know that women’s brains happen to be younger than the male brain?
A latest research indicates that the female brain appears to be about three years more youthful than the brains of the male of the same age when it comes to brain metabolism.
Researcher said various sex-related factors might be the reason why women manage to stay mentally sharp for longer than men.
“We’re just starting to understand how various sex-related factors might affect the trajectory of brain ageing and how that might influence the vulnerability of the brain to neurodegenerative diseases,” said neuroscientist Manu Goyal of the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
And through brain metabolism, it might help them understand some differences between men and women as they age.
Scientists had found that the brain tissue made up of cell bodies are decreasing more quickly in male brains than female brains. And the gene expression of an ageing men changes rapidly which result in a diminishing ability to build and break molecules in the brain.
Evidence in the female brain is suggestive of a form of neoteny that defines as the delaying or slowing of the physiological development of an organism. But none of them look at the metabolism on how the brain runs on glucose.
The brain’s use of glucose changes as an individual comes to age. An aerobic glycolysis is a metabolic process that appears heavily in children who increasingly sync with the synaptic formation and growth.
The brain uses sugar for cognitive function but as we approach adulthood, the process of aerobic glycolysis stage continues to slow down and decline. It usually happens that it reaches at a low level when the persons are in their 60s.
To figure out if there are sex differences based on the exact age, the research team conducted positron emission tomography (PET) scans on 205 people – 121 women and 84 men, from 20 to 82 years old.
The researcher wanted to determine the proportion of the glucose that was being allocated to aerobic glycolysis when they looked at the flow of oxygen in their brains.
To establish the relationship between age and brain metabolism, they fed a machine –learning algorithm with the male sample to establish the data as a baseline.
The researcher tested the algorithm to estimate the ages of the women based merely on their metabolism data. It estimated that the woman were, on average, 3.8 years younger than they actually were.
As vice versa, using the women’s data as a baseline, the estimated men’s age based only on their metabolism data. It determined that men were an average of 2.4 years older than their actual age.
And what is more interesting, it was observed that men even as young as their 20s were already older than their actual age.
“It’s not that men’s brains age faster – they start adulthood about three years older than women, and that persists throughout life,” Goyal said.
“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.”
The team’s research has been published in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America).
