The importance of a healthy and balanced diet regimen for correct functioning of the brain is increasingly being recognized. Week in, week out studies appear recommending a higher consumption of certain meals in order to achieve perfect brain function and steer clear of brain diseases. Despite the fact that it is surely no punishment for the most of us to enhance our chocolate consumption to increase brain function, the essential period throughout which nourishment affects our brain could already be behind us.
Nutrition affects the brain throughout life, however it is potentially essential throughout the crucial prenatal period, throughout which the lion’s share of our brain progress takes place. throughout the time we spend in the womb, our brains undergo dramatic changes. The fetal nervous system from which the brain and spinal cord progression is among the very first units to develop. Its foundations are laid down throughout the pretty very first days of pregnancy. At the end of pregnancy, the brain has actually grown exponentially and is capable of knowing and forming memories. It is actually not pretty hard to imagine that to lay an excellent foundation for the brain it is of ultimate importance to receive the most effective building blocks through correct nourishment of the mother.
A pretty dramatic illustration of the consequences of not receiving adequate nourishment was revealed in a study from the seventies in which Zena Stein and colleagues investigated the effects of prenatal exposure to the Dutch famine on the progress of babies. The Dutch ‘Hungerwinter’ was a period of serious famine that struck the Western section of the Netherlands at the end of Globe War II. There was so little meals available that even pregnant women endured from serious undernutrition. Stein and her colleagues located that babies that had been exposed to the famine throughout the very first trimester of pregnancy had increased rates of birth defects of the central nervous system.
The babies that were born about the time of the Dutch famine are currently concerning 70 years old. In Amsterdam, we have actually been complying with a cohort of individuals that were all of born about the time of the famine from the age of 50 onwards and investigated their good health throughout four waves of research. In each of these studies we compared individuals that had been exposed to the famine throughout early, mid-, or late pregnancy to individuals that had been unexposed to the famine throughout pregnancy. At age 50, the men and women that had been exposed to the famine in early gestation were revealed to much more regularly have actually heart illness accompanied by risk factors for heart illness such as increased cholesterol levels levels and obesity. At age 63 years, it additionally appeared that sadly the women that had been exposed to the famine early gestation, had died much more regularly compared to their contemporaries.
Instigated by the research of the late David Barker and his colleagues that showed that reasonable birth weight as a marker of a inadequate (nutritional) fetal environment was associated along with an increased risk for heart illness and type 2 diabetes, we initially focused our studies in the Dutch famine birth cohort on cardio-metabolic health. At age 58 years, the participants of the cohort underwent a cardiovascular tension testing procedure and as a section of the procedure they performed a so called Stroop task. In this task, you have actually to name the color of the ink in which a color name is written. Executing this calls for selective attention. individuals that had been exposed to the famine in early gestation, performed a lot even worse on this task. As selective focus is a cognitively ability that is among the very first to deteriorate along with increasing age and performance on a computerized Stroop task has actually been revealed to be a predictor for progress of Alzheimer’s Disease, we suspected that those that had been exposed to famine in early gestation could not just be at increased risk for cardio-metabolic illness however could additionally be at greater risk for accelerated ageing of the brain.
To investigate this further, we studied a subsample of our cohort by doing MRI scans of their brains. The very first analyses of these scans showed that the intracranial volume and total brain volume in men exposed to famine in early gestation was smaller sized compared to the volumes in the manage group. We did not locate this difference in women, which could be as a result of the truth that we have actually studied a relatively healthy and balanced sample of exposed women as the much more undesirable women could have actually already died.
When we adjusted our analyses on total brain volume for the differences in intracranial volume, the effects of famine exposure on brain volume disappeared. This means that the effect of famine exposure appears to apply to intracranial volume predominantly. Intracranial volume is presumed to be a measure of the max size that the brain has actually reached throughout lifespan. While brain volume tends to decrease along with age, intracranial volume tends to remain the same, Despite the fact that recent studies have actually cast doubt over this assumption. It is therefore difficult to say whether the smaller sized brains in the exposed men have actually been smaller sized from the begin or have actually become smaller sized along with increasing age. Smaller brain size accomplished in childhood has actually been revealed to be associated along with the progress of Alzheimer’s illness which makes us wonder whether prenatal exposure to undernutrition additionally raises the risk for Alzheimer’s Disease.
In general, we believe that it is striking that the effect of a period of undernutrition in early life is still visible in the brain after almost 70 years. It underscores the necessary impact that nourishment in early life has actually on the brain and could have actually for the rest of your life.
Featured image credit: Pregnancy by Greyerbaby. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.
