Your brain may be aging faster than your body.
University of Florida researchers recently published a study on how lifestyle factors could affect our "brain age."
WUFT's Victoria Perez talked to the researchers — Jared Tanner and Kimberly Sibille — and began by asking about the factors that affect brain age.
Click on the Listen button above to hear the report.
Here is a transcript, lightly edited for clarity.
SIBILLE: Our brains serve as the interface for all of our life experiences, right? It's our thoughts, our feelings, our sensations and our behaviors, and a dynamic balance of stress and challenge and adequate rest and recovery actually promote optimal functioning.
WUFT: What does “brain age” mean in simple terms? How is it different from our age?
TANNER: So this is using brain MRI, and scientists have developed AI tools essentially, to predict how old someone's brain is. So do a scan of their brain, and based off of a lot of images from around the world, [we] are able to use that to help us understand what is kind of what should a brain look like at any given age.
WUFT: What are some healthy habits that can help slow the aging of our brain?
SIBILLE: In our study, specifically things such as quality sleep, avoiding tobacco use, involvement in social supportive experiences, effectively managing stress, optimistic thinking and maintaining a healthy waist circumference – which is really driven by dietary habits and exercise – all seem to contribute in an additive way.
WUFT: And when you say social supportive, Does that just mean like being with family and others in general?
SIBILLE: Yes, involvement in social activities, feeling socially supported, all of those qualify.
WUFT: Kim, what's one thing that you would wish more people understood about brain aging and the potential for preserving their brain health?
SIBILLE: What is amazing and incredibly encouraging is that our brains are plastic and responsive to change, so, literally, at any age each of us can make choices at any moment that can create shifts towards better health.
WUFT: You look at those MRIs. I don't know if I asked this earlier, but what makes a brain look younger than the other ones?
TANNER: So, if we just look at a brain, there are certain what we call features that we can see. So, somebody who has a brain that is older would have more space around the brain. So, our brains are within a skull, and they're surrounded by what we call cerebral spinal fluid, which is kind of like saltwater. And as we get older, our brains tend to shrink a little bit, and so you couldn have more space between the skull and where the brain is.
WUFT: Was there anything surprising that you saw in the research?
TANNER: One of the things that we did see in our sample is that our female participants tended to have younger brains on average than the male participants.
WUFT: That's very interesting because I feel like I'm more stressed than my boyfriend, and he's just very happy-go-lucky. So, I feel like maybe for us that switched. … Back to you. How do you see this research maybe influencing public health recommendations or interventions in the future?
SIBILLE: You know, we often think of medications and medical procedures as the only treatments essentially to improve health outcomes. Our findings align with this growing and exciting body of evidence that lifestyle is truly medicine.
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