By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
Published January 22, 2015
High brain iron levels have been associated with neurological diseases, including multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Even healthy adults have higher iron concentrations in their brains as they age. But just how environmental factors, including diet, influence iron levels in the brain has not been well understood.
Now, UB researchers have conducted a pilot study of the dietary habits of 190 healthy volunteers and have correlated them with brain iron levels using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning.
The researchers believe it is the first study investigating how diet influences in vivo- measured brain iron levels in healthy individuals.
The paper was published online before print on Jan. 17 in the Journal of the Neurobiology of Aging.
“Among environmental factors that can influence putative iron levels, diet is an attractive target to investigate,” says Robert Zivadinov, the paper’s senior author, professor of neurology in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and director of the Department of Neurology’s Buffalo Neuroimaging Analysis Center (BNAC).
Zivadinov cautions that because of the high variability of diet among individuals and even within the same individual, the study’s findings need to be interpreted carefully.
The study reports that brain iron levels appear to be influenced by diet, but those effects vary according to gender.
“We had hypothesized that there were gender differences beforehand, but we certainly did not expect such a strong gender effect,” says Zivadinov, who also is director of MRI at UB’s Clinical and Translational Research Center (CTRC).
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