Men with cardiovascular disease risk factors such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and smoking may have brain health decline, leading to dementia, 10 years earlier than women, finds a study on Wednesday.The findings of a long-term study, published online in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, showed that men with cardiovascular disease risk factors can have dementia onset a decade earlier — from their mid-50s to mid-70s — than similarly affected women who are most susceptible from their mid-60s to mid-70s.
Researchers from Imperial College London, UK found that the most vulnerable regions of the brain are those involved in processing auditory information, aspects of visual perception, emotional processing, and memory. They noted that the damaging effects are just as evident in those who didn’t carry the high-risk APOE4 gene — a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease — as those who did.
