Man and woman have a bunch of physical differences: for instance, shape and appearance. Now, scientists state they have another unseen but important difference: their brain age. According to an investigation from the UW Medical School in St. Louis, by at minimum one biological point, women’s brains are youngish than males of the identical year of birth. Read on to find out the details of this finding.
The neuroscientists processed brain tomography of 205 grown-ups, giving special focus to the metabolism (a set of life-sustaining chemical reactions in organisms) that tends to remodel with time. They discovered that, on the ground of these changes, the biological age of women’s brains turned out to differ by approximately 3 years from men’s one of the same year of birth.
This investigation still needs to be proved in future investigations. However, if fact-based, the scientists suppose that a biologically “young” brain might mean that females may be resilient to changes in the central nervous system connected with age. Consecutively, it may help clarify why women are disposed to have a lesser fall in brain-based functions as they get older, as mentioned in the scientists` research.
The core generator of energy for the brain is blood sugar or in other words, glucose – it fuels the activities of its cells. However, the process of how this substance is used by a brain becomes different with age. At a young age, the brain absorbs more blood sugar through a step-by-step series of interconnected biochemical reactions which are considered to play a crucial role in the growth of the center of the nervous system, as well as the brain’s cell growth. But with age, the brain experiences a fall in the conversion of glucose, which demonstrates very significantly reduced activities by the time males and females are in their sixties.
But not a lot of information is available about the different features of the set of life-sustaining chemical reactions in male and female sexes` brains. Aiming to bring light to this issue, in the new research, the neuroscientists examined the brain computed tomographies of more than 120 women and 80 men ages of whom varied from the 20s to 80s. They upskilled an ML program (AI) to establish a connection between people’s age and their metabolic process in the central nervous system. Further, they instructed the AI to analyze obtained data regarding only men’s ages. Next step, they submitted women’s data and made an order to reckon the biological ages of all females. The findings showed that when learned from men’s data, the AI demonstrated that the divergence between the biological and real ages of these persons was 3.8 years.
After it, the scientists overturned their investigation: they instructed the AI on women’s data and asked it to enumerate the biological ages of males. As a result, the AI demonstrated that the divergence in biological and real men’s brains age was approximately 2.4 years – the biological span of brains turned out to be up in years than their real ages.
An interesting fact: the dissimilarities regarding female and male brain ages were detected also in grown-ups in their twenties. It leads to a conclusion that men’s brains do not get aged quickly — they become older than females at 3 years, and this correlation keeps on during their lifetime.
The scientists stated that the respective “younger state” of women’s brains also come side by side with a little bit longer lifespan contrary to men. What is also crucial to consider is that the dissimilarity regarding male and female brain ages was sort of insignificant as to other obvious sex dissimilarities. At this point, further studies are necessary to be conducted aiming to bring light to this different point in the age of the central nervous system and whether it can affect the risks of aging-related disorders, such as Alzheimer’s.