LEAN MUSCLE MASS PROTECTIVE AGAINST ALZHEIMER’S?
Original source:
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/993969
Lean Muscle Mass Protective Against Alzheimer’s? – Medscape – Jul 03, 2023.
Batya Swift Yasgur, MA, LSW
Lean muscle mass may offer protection against the development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), new research suggests.
Investigators analyzed data on over 450,000 participants in the UK Biobank as well as two independent samples of more than 320,000 individuals with and without AD, and more than 260,000 individuals participating in a separate genes and intelligence study.
They estimated lean muscle and fat tissue in the arms and legs and found, in adjusted analyses, over 500 genetic variants associated with lean mass.
On average, higher genetically lean mass was associated with a “modest but statistically robust” reduction in AD risk and also with superior performance on cognitive tasks.
“Using human genetic data, we found evidence for a protective effect of lean mass on risk of Alzheimer’s disease,” study investigators Iyas Daghlas, MD, a resident in the Department of Neurology, University of California San Francisco, told Medscape Medical News.
Although “clinical intervention studies are needed to confirm this effect, this study supports current recommendations to maintain a healthy lifestyle to prevent dementia,” he said.
The study was published online June 29 in BMJ Medicine.
Naturally Randomized Research
Several measures of body composition have been investigated for their potential association with AD. Lean mass — a “proxy for muscle mass, defined as the difference between total mass and fat mass” — has been shown to be reduced in patients with AD compared with controls, the researchers note.
“Previous research studies have tested the relationship of body mass index (BMI) with Alzheimer’s disease and did not find evidence for a causal effect,” Daghlas said. “We wondered whether BMI was an insufficiently granular measure and hypothesized that disaggregating body mass into lean mass and fat mass could reveal novel associations with disease.”
Most studies have used case-control designs, which might be biased by “residual confounding or reverse causality.” Naturally randomized data “may be used as an alternative to conventional observational studies to investigate causal relations between risk factors and diseases,” the researchers write.
In particular, the Mendelian randomization (MR) paradigm randomly allocates germline genetic variants and uses them as proxies for a specific risk factor.
Fuente: https://www.intramed.net/contenidover.asp?contenidoid=102187
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