A new USC-led study on rats that feasted on a high-fat, sweet diet raises the possibility that a junk food-filled diet in teens may disrupt their brains’ memory ability for a very long time.
“What we see not simply in this paper, but in some of our other current work, is that if these rats grew up on this unhealthy food diet plan, then they have these memory impairments that do not go away,” said Scott Kanoski, a professor of life sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “If you just basically them on a healthy diet plan, these impacts regrettably last well into adulthood.”
The research study appears in the May problem of the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.
In establishing the study, Kanoski and lead author and postdoctoral research study fellow Anna Hayes thought about that prior research has actually shown a link in between poor diet plan and Alzheimer’s illness. People who experience Alzheimer’s disease tend to have lower levels of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine in the brain that is important for memory and functions such as finding out, attention, arousal and involuntary muscle motion.
The group wondered what this could suggest for younger people who might be on a comparable fat-filled, sweet Western diet plan, particularly throughout adolescence when their brain is going through substantial advancement. By tracking the effect of the diet plan on the rats’ levels of acetylcholine and running the rats through some memory testing, they might find out more about the important relationship between diet plan and memory.
The scientists tracked the acetylcholine levels of a group of rats on a fatty, sweet diet and in a control group of rats by analyzing their brain actions to particular tasks created to evaluate their memory. The team analyzed the rats’ brains post-mortem for indications of interfered with acetylcholine levels.
The memory test involved letting the rats check out brand-new objects in various places. Days later, the scientists reestablished the rats to the scene that was nearly similar other than for the addition of one brand-new object. Rats on the junk food diet showed indications they could not remember which object they had actually formerly seen, and where, while those in the control group revealed familiarity.
“Acetylcholine signaling is a system to assist them encode and keep in mind those events, comparable to ‘episodic memory’ in human beings that enables us to bear in mind events from our past,” lead author Hayes explained. “That signal appears to not be occurring in the animals that matured consuming the fatty, sugary diet.”
Kanoski stressed that teenage years is an extremely sensitive period for the brain when crucial changes are taking place in development. “I do not understand how to state this without sounding like Cassandra and doom and gloom,” he said, “but regrettably, some things that might be more easily reversible throughout adulthood are less reversible when they are happening throughout youth.”
There is at least some hope for intervention. Kanoski said that in another round of the research study, the research study team examined whether the memory damage in rats raised on the unhealthy food diet plan might be reversed with medication that induces the release of acetylcholine. They utilized two drugs, PNU-282987 and carbachol, and discovered that with those treatments provided directly to the hippocampus, a brain area that manages memory and is interfered with in Alzheimer’s illness, the rats’ memory ability was brought back.
But without that special medical intervention, Kanoski said more research is required to know how memory issues from a processed food diet throughout adolescence can be reversed.
In addition to Kanoski and Hayes, the team included other USC Dornsife researchers Logan Tierno Lauer, Alicia E. Kao, Molly E. Klug, Linda Tsan, Jessica J. Rea, Keshav S. Subramanian, Cindy Gu, Arun Ahuja, Kristen N. Donohue and Léa Décarie-Spain; Natalie Tanios of Keck School of Medicine of USC; as well as Anthony A. Fodor and Shan Sun of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
The work was supported by the following: National Institute of Diabetes and Digestion and Kidney Diseases grant DK123423 (SEK, AAF), National Institute of Diabetes and Digestion and Kidney Illness grant DK104897 (SEK), Postdoctoral Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Study Service Award from the National Institute on Aging F32AG077932 (AMRH), National Science Foundation Graduate Research study Fellowships (different awards to LT and KSS), Quebec Research Funds postdoctoral fellowship 315201 (LDS) and the Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship to Promote Diversity AARFD-22-972811 (LDS).
Rats that were fed a diet chock-full of fat and sugar in their teenage years suffered memory problems, USC researchers found.
