A team of researchers has found that a cognitive decline from a continued habit of eating high-calorie food is due to abnormalities in the synapses, or junctions between nerve cells.<\/p>\n
While previous studies had shown that a continued high-calorie diet slows down brain functions, researchers had yet to unravel the complex mechanism on a molecular level.<\/p>\n
The findings by the team, including Hitoshi Okazawa, professor at the Institute of Science Tokyo, were published in September in international science journal Molecular Psychiatry.<\/p>\n
In an experiment, the team had some mice on a high-calorie diet for either one or six weeks to compare their nerve cells on a molecular level with those of mice given regular food.<\/p>\n
The team observed a decline in polyglutamine binding protein 1, or PQBP1, in mice given a high-calorie diet. The protein regulates the production of proteins necessary for proper nerve cell transmission.<\/p>\n
Upon further analysis, the team found that insulin had restricted the mechanism to create PQBP1 among mice on a high-calorie diet, resulting in abnormalities in synaptic components and subsequently a decline in neural circuit functions.<\/p>\n
The synaptic abnormalities and declined cognitive functions were improved once the mice went through treatment to add PQBP1 or drugs to treat diabetes.<\/p>\n
Okazawa said that a further study may help prevent Alzheimer\u2019s among people with diabetes or obesity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A team of researchers has found that a cognitive decline from a continued habit of eating high-calorie food…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[6779,8264,1596,564,134,111,139,69,4368],"class_list":["post-631113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-aging","tag-alzheimer","tag-brain","tag-food","tag-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-obesity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}