It has been recently founded that the South American people who were present before the time of industrialization were having a much slower rate of brain aging when compared to Westerns. There were almost 16000 people in the study who were from the backward part of the Bolivian Amazon basically the Tsimane population.
Aging Of The Brain Is Slower Among Amazon People Which Prevents Brain Shrinkage And Dementia
Lifestyle deep follows included farming, hunting, gathering food, and the activities practised by the remote man. They were far away from today’s man-static lifestyle with almost no physical activity.
Researches which were done before found that the Tsimane population including aged men do not suffer from any of the chronic diseases which were common for today’s man even in middle age including obesity, heart diseases, diabetes, high blood pressure and blocked arteries.
After which it made everyone curious to know if this is true for the aging of the brain or diseases like shrinkage of the brain and related atrophy as one grows old.
Though little shrinkage of the brain is common while growing old but this in larger rate is a sign of some chronic disease like physical impairment and dementia which was found to be not true in the case of the Tsimane population. It was seen that the brain shrinkage in their case was almost 70% slower than other European and American men of today’s time.
Andrei Irimia at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, is an assistant professor of gerontology, biomedical engineering, and neuroscience said“I have told that it is not really known the reason behind no much shrinkage of the brain in the case of the Tsimane population.
But they can say it may be due to their good cardiovascular health and health heart this also plays a vital role in brain health. The common lifestyle pattern to be followed for preventing dementia includes regular exercise, eating a healthy planned diet, and no smoking at all.”
Irimia said that Tsimane people are much physically active which works for them as a healthy exercise and the consumption of unsaturated good fat and low intake of salt, sugar, saturated fat and added preservative.
Though this is considered to be a lifestyle pattern which might be good for a healthy brain, still we cannot conclude that this is the only reason behind because these people suffer a lot from a number of infections and have inflammations in the body which are the cause of dementia sometimes.
For finding out the exact answer to the question the search was done on 746 Tsimane people aged between 40 and 94 and they were brought for a city scan in the Bolivian city of Trinidad. These results were compared to the results of the European and American population and it was found that Tsimane people had very less tissue loss but still this can’t be concluded that it is only due to a healthy heart added by the senior director of scientific engagement Rebecca Edelmayer, from Alzheimer’s Association, in Chicago.
She had further added by saying that we haven’t taken into consideration the cardiovascular health and inflammation in the body of people and neither have we actually checked on the thinking power and memory of the individuals.
So making such conclusions will be wrong. Also, it is quite evident that a healthy heart plays a vital role in a healthy brain but environmental exposure, genes, and some other factors also play a crucial role in dementia and cannot be ignored.
What we can conclude is that a physically active lifestyle regular exercise and healthy eating pattern, of course, plays a very important role in increasing longevity and better health which should not be ignored by people.