REVEALED: How Diabetes Impacts Your Brain
There’s nothing good about type 2 diabetes.
When high levels of blood sugar run rampant throughout your body, the collateral damage to your cells puts you at risk for complications like heart disease, vision problems, neuropathy, kidney damage, increased infections, slow wound healing, depression, and more.
Well, this list of potential complications just went from BAD to worse.
Because researchers found out that we can add another alarming, life-altering complication to the list:
Cognitive decline and brain aging.
Researchers analyzed data from 20,000 people, and they compared it to a meta-analysis of 34 cognitive studies and 60 neuroimaging studies.
What all of these studies confirmed is that age is connected to cognitive decline.
No surprise there (although there are plenty of ways to prevent this, but that’s for another article).
What was surprising was this: having type 2 diabetes essentially put people on a fast-track to an aging brain.
Type 2 diabetics had an additional 13 percent decrease in executive function and an additional 6.7 percent decrease in processing speed beyond the typical impacts of aging.
The meta-analysis found similar decreases in cognitive function in type 2 diabetics.
In addition, the study showed that type 2 diabetics had highest levels of brain atrophy, the loss of brain cells.
Overall, the people in the study with the most severe neurocognitive effects were those who had had type 2 diabetes the longest.
One potential reason for diabetes causing such a sharp decline in brain function is the fact that it decreases the availability of glucose in the brain.
This one is a no-brainer.
Know your blood sugar levels, and be sure to stay well BELOW the range for diabetes AND pre-diabetes.
And keep tuning in to articles like this one for tips on how to do that.
P.S. Here are the best “brain foods” that can help your PREVENT—and REVERSE – the age of your brain… by up to 7.5 years.
