Obesity is an established risk factor for dementia and Alzheimer's disease, but what actually happens inside the brain to create that risk has never been pinned down. Timothy Jarome, a neuroscientist at Virginia Tech, is taking on that question with a $410,000 grant from the National Institute on Aging, testing the idea that obesity accelerates the brain's normal aging process and brings on memory decline sooner than it would otherwise appear.
Jarome is a professor in the School of Animal Sciences within Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where his lab studies the molecular machinery underlying memory disorders including dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The framing matters: rather than treating obesity as one more item on a list of risk factors, the work asks whether it changes the pace at which the aging brain deteriorates.
The numbers behind the project explain the urgency. Roughly one in three adults over 70 experiences age-related memory loss, and there is no treatment for it. At the same time, close to 40 percent of American adults are obese. If those two trends are mechanistically linked rather than merely coexisting, the overlap represents a very large population.
This is early-stage research, funded to answer a mechanistic question rather than to test a therapy. Identifying the molecular steps that connect body weight to faster brain aging is the kind of groundwork that has to happen before anyone can design a drug or intervention aimed at interrupting the process.