The brains of women shrink more slowly

A new discovery may explain why women in old age remain more mentally fit your brain will not shrink more slowly than men, but also the metabolism slows down in men and women in different ways. As a result, the brains of women appear three years younger.

Older women cut in rationality, memory, and problem solving better than men of the same age. Researchers at the University of Washington wanted to find out why this is so, and developed a special program, with the age of the brain can calculate. The algorithm showed that the brains of women were on average 3.8 years younger than her biological age. If the process was reversed, calculated in the program, that the brains of men were 2.4 years older than their actual age.

"It is not so, that the brains of men age faster – you are in the adult age is about three years older than the women, and through the whole life of hinweg", Prof. Manu Goyal from Mallinckrodt said the Institute for radiology at the University of Washington. "We are only just beginning to understand how various gender-related factors influence the course of brain ageing and what influences that has on diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease."

For the study, the researchers studied 205 people between 20 and 82 years, as sugar as a source of energy in the brain is used. With the help of brain Scans they had measured their consumption of oxygen and glucose. Through a machine learning algorithm, they created a relationship between the age and the Brain metabolism.

ZOU