Researchers Find More Evidence For the Strange Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer's (sciencealert.com)

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: People with high blood sugar stand to experience worse long-term cognitive decline than their healthy peers, even if they're not technically type 2 diabetic, new research suggests. The findings are not the first linking diabetes with impaired cognitive functions, but they're some of the clearest yet showing blood sugar isn't just a marker of our dietary health -- it's also a telling predictor of how our brains may cope as we get older. "Our findings suggest that interventions that delay diabetes onset, as well as management strategies for blood sugar control, might help alleviate the progression of subsequent cognitive decline over the long-term," explain the researchers, led by epidemiologist Wuxiang Xie from Imperial College London. The researchers sourced their data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, an ongoing assessment of the health of a representative sample of the English population aged 50 and older, which began in in 2002. For its analysis, the team tracked 5,189 participants -- 55 percent women, with an average age of 66 years -- assessing their level of cognitive function between 2004-2005 to 2014-2015, spanning several waves of the ELSA study. The findings are reported in the journal Diabetologia.

Comments

No shit Sherlock

[niittyniemi]

This is little more than confirmation of what was already known:

Diabetes damages your vascular system. Even if your blood glucose control is excellent, you will still get periods when your BG goes high and your blood vessels will get deposits on their walls and hence restrict supply of oxygenated blood to the tissues that require it.

The results are systemic. If you don't get enough oxygen to tissues that need it, they will die. That includes not only the well recognised bits that get damaged by diabetes: retinas, kidneys, feet etc. but stuff that most medics don't recognise: the rest of your body including your brain.

I speak with some experience: I'm an insulin-dependent diabetic. I've got a loss of feeling in my feet although my retinas are still reasonable.

Yet there must be ongoing damage to the fine vasculature in my nut. My experience of living with people who have dementia is that the effects are insidious and you don't initially notice it. It's effects have an exponential progress, IMO.

I'm 55 now but I reckon within 10 years, I'll be too bonkers to put finger to keyboard. I hope to die before then.

Re:No shit Sherlock

[Bongo]

There's quite a few people out there, from various scientists to doctors to members of the public, doing some form or low carb, paleo, primal, and even zero carb, and finding that they thrive on it (yes very controversial as it means public health advice for last 30 years has been wrong, but that's progress).

Basically, don't eat sugar, or stuff that turns to sugar, and body does not then have to deal with damage from sugar.

Recently I have gone zero carb [1] and I just cannot get my head around how my body simply had no need for any sugar or carbs at all.
Naturally people have to experiment for themselves to see if this is also true for them.
Get a blood glucose meter, and wake up feeling fine on say, 4.0 mmol/l or 72 mg/dl

[1] More or less, there is the odd gram of a carb in cream cheese and so on.

Re:If you eat sugar...

[geekmux]

"...you get Alzheimer's. If you use artificial sweetener you get dementia. Either way you're fucked."

Just get Stevia, it's not sugar and also not artificial. Sweet.

It's sweet, until the Sugar Mafia steps in and provides "irrefutable" evidence through many "sponsored" studies that proves Stevia causes smartphone addiction and IBS.

Never put anything past Greed.