Health
Despite the fact that women live longer than men, science has recently conclusively and irrevocably proven that women's brains age faster. What is the reason for this inequality? According to recent studies, stress is to blame. This conclusion does not sound sensational, especially against the background of the fact that stress is one of the factors that accelerate the aging process of a woman's body as a whole.
In general, as our bodies age, some genes lose their activity, while others, on the contrary, become more active. As for the human brain, such age-related changes in it can be observed by studying a combination of certain RNA molecules (ribonucleic acid molecules) that display gene activity in each individual cell population. Such a collection is called a “transcript” in the scientific world.
When University of California specialists compared this very brain transcriptome of 55 women and men of different ages, scientists were quite surprised to note that the processes of activation and the deactivation of certain genes that occur as we age develops more rapidly in women. This is particularly pronounced in the part of the cerebral cortex that corresponds to the prefrontal area.
“This is not at all what we expected,” said one of the study's leaders, computational biologist Mehmet Somel. According to the scientist, he and his colleagues based their assumptions on the fact that women, on average, live longer than men. Therefore, the researchers expected to record a slower aging of the brain in women. Somel noted that this, at the same time, does not contradict the general concept of aging, according to which different organs age at different rates.
Somel and his colleagues did a titanic job, studying the activity of more than 13,000 genes in four regions of the brain. In one area, the frontal upper gyrus, scientists found 667 genes whose activity varied between women and men as they aged. However, the scientists' conclusions are unambiguous and disappointing for the female half of the population — their brains are aging faster. In addition, scientists have previously associated some of these genes with general mental impairment.
Stress is to blame for everything!
It is noteworthy that the specific differences in the aging of the brains of men and women that have been discovered by scientists are not at all the same when it comes to women only. As it turned out, about half of the fairer sex developed brain aging processes faster than other women. Researchers have suggested that environmental factors are not responsible for this uneven aging.
“Higher levels of stress are responsible for the faster development of brain aging processes,” said Memet Somel. However, the biologist said that this conclusion is so far based only on a speculative theory put forward by scientists, based on the results of a study of experimental monkeys. However, there are grounds for such judgments, since stress causes monkeys to change the same mechanisms in certain parts of the brain as in humans.
Such conclusions were received ambiguously in the scientific community. According to some scientists, it is too early to say that stress is to blame, as stress is just one of many factors that influence brain aging. Meanwhile, Somel is preparing for the next research, which will be conducted, this time, on rodents. The scientist is sure that if the aging mechanism is confirmed in this case, women around the world will have to seriously think about how to reduce the number of stressful situations in their lives in order to as much as possible keep your mind clear longer.