A surprising red flag in your bones could signal future brain decline
How can your bones tell you about your brain health?Researchers at Johns Hopkins knew that bone and brain health can both deteriorate with age.They wondered whether the health of one could offer clues about how quickly the other would decline.
It might be a way to spot problems in the brain earlier and more easily.Part of the puzzle is white matter: millions of nerve fibers that act like cables sending electrical messages between regions of the brain.White matter degrades naturally as we age, and that’s associated with vascular dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and cerebral small vessel disease, which can cause strokes.Researchers found a routine scan of a completely different part of the body could give us clues about how fast our white matter — and cognition — might degrade down the road.What researchers aimed to connect white matter results with was bone density — something that can be determined by analyzing results from a routine CT scan.In contrast, the brain MRIs researchers used are much less routinely ordered.Researchers looked at people who had a non-contrast CT scan done on the chest, a multimodal brain MRI and cognitive testing.
They found lower bone density was associated with faster decline in three areas.First, they looked at data from those MRIs.They found that the lower the bone density in the spine, the more the integrity of the white matter fibers declined as well, specifically in one area responsible for cognition and executive function (planning, organization, emotional regulation).They also found that lower bone density was associated with faster accumulation of white matter hyperintensities — areas of damaged or abnormal white matter that appear as bright spots on MRI.These abnormalities become more common with age and are associated with damage to the brain’s small blood vessels, cognitive decline and an increased risk of dementia.The final finding looked at data from the cognitive testing.
People with lower bone density decline...