Only three?
>Women’s brains appear younger than those belonging to men of exactly the same age in scans measuring the organ's metabolism, according to a new study.
>They were found to be around three to four years more “youthful” than their male contemporaries. The discovery may help doctors understand why women are less susceptible to memory loss and neurological diseases as they age.
>Brain ageing is known to be associated with a gradual decline in brain metabolism. With their new study, scientists from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. attempted to gauge the “metabolic age” of people’s brains in their new study.
>In particular, they focused on a process known as aerobic glycolysis, which uses glucose sugar to sustain brain development as people grow from children to adults. As adulthood progresses, less and less of the glucose pumped through people’s brains to provide them with energy is funnelled into this >process. Only a tiny amount goes in by the time people are in their 60s. The fraction of sugar powering glycolysis was therefore used by scientists in their new study as a marker of brain age.
>When training the algorithm using men’s ages and brain data before applying it to women, it concluded that female brains were aged an average of 3.8 years younger than their actual, chronological age. One of the study's authors, Professor Manu Goyal, said this was a fairly strong example of measurable differences between sexes, although not as strong as more well-established distances like height.
>Women’s brains known to be more resilient to cognitive decline, with older women tending to score higher in tests of reason, memory and problem solving than men of the same age.
>“It’s not that men’s brains age faster – they start adulthood about three years older than women, and that persists throughout life,” said Prof Goyal.
