A spare tire around the midsection is more than a cosmetic concern. Research suggests that a specific type of fat buried deep in the abdomen may be quietly speeding up brain shrinkage and mental decline in middle age, and that getting rid of it could slow the damage for years, even a decade later.

A large, long-running follow-up study tracked more than 500 adults for up to 16 years. People who lost and kept offvisceral fat— the deep belly fat packed around internal organs — showed slower brain shrinkage and better scores on thinking and memory tests well into their early sixties. General weight loss, as measured by body mass index or BMI, didn’t show the same brain-protective pattern. It was specifically the deep abdominal fat that mattered.

That distinction could reshape how doctors and public health officials think about obesity anddementia risk. While the link between beingoverweightand mental decline has been studied for years, this research singles out one particular fat deposit as uniquely harmful, and as a target that lifestyle changes can actually shrink.

It’s important to note that this research was published as an advance, unedited manuscript inNature Communicationsto allow early access to its findings. The paper has not yet undergone final editorial review, and the authors note that errors may be present.

Called the Follow-up Intervention Trials (FIT) project, the research brought together participants from four prior clinical trials conducted between 2005 and 2018 in Israel. Those original trials had tested various lifestyle changes, including different diets and exercise programs, over 18 to 24 months. For the FIT project, the researchers tracked down 647 of the original 881 eligible participants years later, collecting new brain scans, abdominal fat measurements, and cognitive test scores between 5 and 16 years after the original programs ended.

Of those, 533 adults completed brain MRI scans at the follow-up visit. The group was 86 percent male, with an average age of about 61. Participants had started the original trials at an average age of 52, with an average BMI of about 30, placing most in the overweight-to-obese range. Many hadexcess belly fat, abnormal cholesterol levels, orType 2 diabetes.The heavily male sample is an important caveat: the findings may not fully apply to women, who tend to store and metabolize fat differently.

Using MRI machines, researchers measured both abdominal fat and brain structure. For abdominal fat, they distinguished between three types: visceral fat (the deep, organ-hugging kind) and two layers of fat sitting just beneath the skin. For the brain, they measured total brain volume,gray matter,white matter, the fluid-filled spaces inside the brain called ventricles, and how much room the hippocampus, a region central to memory, occupied.

At the follow-up visit, people with more visceral fat scored lower on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, a widely used screening test for thinking andmemory problems. The average score suggested mild cognitive difficulties for the group, though the researchers noted this was consistent with the metabolic health profiles of the participants.

Neither type of fat sitting closer to the skin showed the same harmful associations. Only visceral fat stood out.

Researchers also looked at how much visceral fat a person had carried over the full span from their original trial through the follow-up. Among 295 participants with complete data across three time points, higher cumulative visceral fat exposurewas tied tolower scores on both the MoCA and its memory-specific portion. Fat beneath the skin showed no such link, and neither did BMI.

Source: Drudge Report