Unhealthy lifestyles and brain condition: Examining the relations of BMI, living alone, alcohol intake, short sleep, smoking, and lack of exercise with gray matter volume

PLoS One. 2021 Jul 30;16(7):e0255285. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255285. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Unhealthy lifestyles are damaging to the brain. Previous studies have indicated that body mass index (BMI), alcohol intake, short sleep, smoking, and lack of exercise are negatively associated with gray matter volume (GMV). Living alone has also been found to be related to GMV through lowered subjective happiness. However, to our knowledge, no GMV study has dealt with these unhealthy lifestyles simultaneously. By our analyses based on 142 healthy Japanese participants, BMI, alcohol intake, living alone, and short sleep were negatively associated with the gray-matter brain healthcare quotient (GM-BHQ), an MRI-based normalized GMV, after controlling for age, sex, and facility, not only individually but also when they were entered into a single regression model. Moreover, there were small but significant differences in the proportion of the variance for GM-BHQ explained by variables in a regression model (measured by R squared) between when these unhealthy variables were entered in an equation at the same time and when they were entered separately, with the former larger than the latter. However, smoking and lack of exercise were not significantly associated with GM-BHQ. Results indicate that some kinds of unhealthy lifestyles are somewhat harmful on their own, but may become more noxious to brain condition if practiced simultaneously, although its difference may not be large. To our knowledge, this study is the first to show that overlapping unhealthy lifestyles affects the brains of healthy adults.

Publication types

  • Clinical Trial
  • Multicenter Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Alcohol Drinking / adverse effects*
  • Body Mass Index*
  • Cerebral Cortex / diagnostic imaging*
  • Exercise*
  • Female
  • Gray Matter / diagnostic imaging*
  • Health Risk Behaviors
  • Humans
  • Life Style*
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging*
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Sleep*
  • Tobacco Smoking / adverse effects*

Grants and funding

This work was funded by ImPACT Program of Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan) and supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Number JP17H06151). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.