There appear to be many health benefits to getting bariatric surgery for weight loss — including ameliorating diabetes — but is improvement in memory one of them?
A preliminary but provocative study recently published in Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases finds evidence supporting that intriguing notion.
In a study of 150 people, those who received surgery showed significantly improved memory performance three months later compared to before the surgery. Obese patients in the control group — who didn’t get the surgery — showed actual memory decline compared to their baseline.
However, the memory improvements for the most part weren’t linked to weight loss or improvements in other medical conditions, according to the authors. So what’s behind the findings?
John Gunstad, the lead author on the paper, writes in an email to the Health Blog that “obesity causes many physiological changes that can harm the brain, even if below [the] threshold for medical diagnosis,” such as systemic inflammation, poorer control of blood-sugar levels and reduced cardiovascular fitness.
“Improvements in these processes might be enough to produce improvements in cognitive function,” he writes. “We are currently looking at these and other possible mechanisms to better understand the source of the improvements.”
One factor that doesn’t appear to explain the improved memory is a change in mood, he says — the patients didn’t have significant mood disturbance prior to surgery. “Although we can’t fully rule out some contribution of minor mood changes, we wouldn’t expect that it would account for the robust changes in memory,” says Gunstad.
He and other groups are also looking to see if non-surgical weight loss might produce similar benefits.