It appears that everything is connected when it comes to aging. If you’re worried about keeping yourself physically fit and aging healthily, that’s also inextricably tied to your brain health and cognitive functioning. What affects your body’s aging will also affect your brain’s aging. While genetics plays a role in how well you age and how long you live, you likely can influence many factors that support healthier physical aging and brain function as you get older. Several new research studies serve to underscore the point that there are modifiable factors, potentially within your control, that may accelerate your brain aging. Ideally, you can intervene before damage takes place.

First, consider a brand new study published in Nature Communications that identifies 3 critical risk factors that may cause vulnerable parts of your brain to age more quickly. According to this study, air pollution from traffic, diabetes, and alcohol intake frequency (how much and how often you drink) all appear to be among the most important factors causing deterioration in certain vulnerable spots in the brain, and all 3 are known risk factors for dementia. While this research may lead to more targeted therapeutic options for addressing dementia in the future, in the meantime it should give you pause about how you are currently living. For more on this study, click here and here.

Your diet and weight also appear to be critical factors in accelerating the aging of your brain (in addition to physical problems that may result from a poor diet and being overweight). According to a new study (of mice) reported at the recent annual meeting of the American Physiological Society, obesity and a high-fat diet may accelerate aging in your brain by causing damage to the brain blood vessels, thereby reducing the supply of oxygen getting to your brain and causing cognitive decline. It appears that obesity may lead to cell senescence, causing inflammation and damaging neighboring cells in the brain. Not only did obese mice in this study appear to have accelerated brain aging but their ability to navigate a maze was impaired compared to mice that were not obese. While humans are not mice, the lessons of the potential impact of obesity and a high-fat diet on the brain should not be lost on us as we try to steer our way to healthier aging. For more on this research, step on your scale and click here.

Other recent studies have highlighted additional factors such as poverty, sleep deprivation, and chronic pain that may all speed up the aging process in your brain. While none of these are necessarily easy to address and resolve, they do point to the essential connection between keeping yourself physically healthy and preserving and protecting your brain functioning as you get older. To read more on these topics, look here for the brain impact of problematic sleep, here for how chronic pain may age your brain, and here for how poverty may influence brain aging.

Finally, on a positive note, research examining the brain size of people born in the 1930s versus people born in the 1970s shows that the size of human brains appears to be increasing. According to this research published in JAMA Neurology, larger brain size may indicate the potential for more brain reserve, something that may help you fight off the ravages of Alzheimer’s or other dementias. While this research is far from definitive (and requires further study with a more diverse population) it is good news given the looming demographic explosion of aging populations worldwide. So take out your tape measure and find out more here.