The Effects of Diabetes on the Brain


This is the Medscape Neurology Minute. I am Dr. Alan Jacobs. The American Diabetes Association estimates that as many as 1 in 3 American adults will have diabetes in the year 2050. Now, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have used MRI to investigate the association between severity and duration of type 2 diabetes mellitus and brain structure in 614 patients at 4 participating medical centers. The mean age of the participants was 62 years, and the mean duration of disease in the study group was 9.9 years. The results showed that a longer duration of diabetes was associated with brain volume loss, particularly in the gray matter. For every 10 years of diabetes duration, the brain of a patient with diabetes looked 2 years older than that of a nondiabetic person. Of interest, the study found no association of diabetes characteristics with small-vessel disease in the brain. The study authors concluded that diabetes duration correlates primarily with brain gray matter atrophy, and that this has implications for the future decline in cognitive functions in patients with diabetes, raising the likelihood that neurodegenerative changes, such as Alzheimer's disease, will correlate more strongly than vascular dementia. This has been the Medscape Neurology Minute. I'm Dr. Alan Jacobs.