- Menopause results in changes in a woman’s hormones, which have many effects on the body, including fat distribution.
- While different types of fat distribution have different effects on a person’s overall health, the composition and type of fat a person has also has an impact.
- A new study has suggested that the composition of fat that a woman has in mid-life, around the time of menopause, can affect the likelihood they will experience cognitive difficulties later in life.
The key to tackling obesity may be energy balance, but it is more complicated than ‘calories in calories out’.
In fact, the type of fat the body stores its energy in has an effect on our overall fat balance and metabolism, which in turn affects other aspects of our health, such as cardiovascular and brain health for example.
A recent study carried out by researchers at various sites across the United States investigated fat deposits at different sites in the heart and aorta in a cohort of 531 women with a mean age of 51. This age was expected to overlap with menopause.
White fat is denser than brown fat. But how brown and white fat distribution affects health postmenopause has previously proved difficult to study as imaging is difficult.
Scientists took images using electron beam CT scanning of the heart and aorta and carried out tests to determine fat density at three different sites: inside the sac surrounding the heart, fat located outside that sac, and on the fat that surrounds the aorta, the body’s largest artery leading away from the heart.
Researchers also carried out cognitive tests on the women involved, a median of 13.4 years after scans were taken when women were an average of 61 years old.
They discovered that the greater the amount of brown fat discovered around the aorta during midlife and menopause in the women, the higher the cognition of these women later in life.
Conversely, the higher the levels of white fat discovered around the aorta in these women, the lower their…
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