People with Alzheimer’s who have a large head have better memory and more capacityto think that those patients with the same disease and a smaller head, even if Alzheimer’s has killed the same number of neurons in both cases. This has been demonstrated by a work carried out by researchers from the Technical University of Munich (Germany) and published today in the journalNeurology.
According to the author of this study, Robert Perneczky of the Technical University of Munich, “these results addweight to the brain reserve theory, that is, the individual ability to resist changes in the brain“.” Our findings also underscore theimportance of the brain developing optimally in the early stages of life, until it reaches 93 percent of its final size, at the age of six years, “he adds.
Head size is one of the ways to measure brain reserves and brain growth. According to Perneczky, while the brain grows it is determined in part by genetics, but also by nutrition, infections and inflammation of the central nervous system and brain damage.
“Improving prenatal and early life conditions could significantly increase brain reserves, which could have an impact on the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or the severity of its symptoms,” he says.
A total of 270 people with Alzheimer’s participated in this study, performing tests of memory and cognitive abilities, as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of their brains to measure the number of neurons with which this disease ended. The size of the head was determined by measuring its circumference.
The work showed that a larger head size was associated with better results in memory and reflection tests, even when there is an equivalent degree of cell death in the brain. Specifically, for every 1 percent of dead neurons, an additional centimeter of the head is associated with a 6 percent better result in memory tests.
