Some People’s Liver “Eats” Their Brain, New Evidence Suggests

According to a recent paper published in the journal Cell Reports, it can sometimes happen that a person's liver “eats” their brain. What's more, it appears that this translates into an increased risk to suffer from memory loss and dementia in later life.

Rush University Medical Center researchers say that, as their investigations have shown, the liver and the hippocampus, i.e. a brain area previously documented to be the memory center, both have a surprisingly sweet tooth for a protein dubbed PPARalpha.

The liver needs this protein to effectively burn fat reserves in the belly. The hippocampus, on the other hand, cannot process memory in its absence.

These claims are backed up by data collected while carrying out a series of experiments on mice. Thus, rodents whose liver had plenty of PARalpha but whose brain did not have access to this protein were found to have a fairly poor memory and really bad learning skills.

Mice that had plenty of PARalpha in their brain, but not in their liver, displayed no memory issues and had no trouble learning new things.

Scientists theorize that, in the case of individuals who pack a tad too much abdominal fat, the liver does not take long to use up its quota of said protein, simply because it has more work to do, Live Science reports.

Once this happens, it goes looking for another fix. Thus, it pretty much raids the body and grabs hold of other organs' PPARalpha stashes, the same source details.

This means that it also leaves the hippocampus without the right amount of protein that it would need in order to stick to its working agenda.

The Rush University Medical Center researchers say that, all things considered, this is probably the reason why previous studies have found that individuals thick around the waist are about three times more likely to suffer from memory loss and be diagnosed with dementia in later life.

“Further research must be conducted to see how we could potentially maintain normal PPARalpha in the [human] brain in order to be resistant to memory loss,” Professor Kalipada Pahan stressed.