I’m speaking at the @alzheimersresearchuk.org Conference 2026 on 🍏 👵 The Role of Diet and Brain Age in Multidimensional Healthy Ageing on 25th Feb (Day 2), Session 7 in Charter 1 and present a poster 2.13 already today ! Can’t wait to connect and share research. #ARUKconf
I’m excited to lead the table discussions on food environment and eating behaviour during the Satellite sessions of the DEMON Social Determinants of Dementia Meeting at @alzheimersresearchuk.org today! #ARUKconf
Come work with us!
Thank you for sharing our study!
In terms of other lifestyle factors, we have accounted for them in the study as 'confounders'. Therefore, effects are independent of those.
We fully agree that further research has to be done in woman studies, therefore replication of those effects in more balanced cohorts are the next planned step!
Thank you for your comments. Indeed the Whitehall II study has the limitation of being predominantly male, however the Whitehall II study is one of the largest longitudinal cohorts which was the main benefit of this study.
@oxfordpsychiatry.bsky.social @medsci.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk @unileipzig.bsky.social @mpicbs.bsky.social @mansfieldoxford.bsky.social
#BrainHealth #Neuroscience #DietAndHealth #HealthyAging #Prevention #Dementia
8/ 👥 Thank you also to the fantastic co-author’s contributions Tasnime Akbaraly, Michelle Jansen, Archana Singh-Manoux, Mika Kivimäki EnikoZsoldos, the @whitehall2study.bsky.social team and the reviewers who made this paper better.
7/ 🙌 I am really happy and grateful for the team behind this paper and all the valuable advice and mentorship throughout the years!
6/ 🧠💪 Maintaining a higher diet quality and a reduced waist-to-hip ratio during midlife are crucial for enhancing brain connectivity and cognitive function in older age. These findings underscore the importance of lifestyle interventions in midlife to promote long-term brain health.
5/ 📈->🧠-> 🧩 Higher WHR in midlife was associated with lower cognitive performance scores, particularly in memory and executive function. This association was partially mediated by changes in WM connectivity (i.e. FA radial and mean diffusivity).
Voxel-wise association between the intercept of WHR and WM connectivity of mean diffusivity, radial diffusivity, and fractional anisotropy
4/ 📈🧠 Higher WHR in midlife was associated with higher diffusivity covering up to 26 % of the total WM tracts, and lower FA of the WM skeleton.
Longitudinal Change in diet quality associated with WM Connectivity
3/🍎🧠 Better diet quality was linked to enhanced functional connectivity between the hippocampus and occipital lobe & cerebellum. Higher 🍎 over time was related to better WM integrity in several tracts, indicating healthier brain structure.
Predicted longitudinal trajectories of diet and WHR using a linear and cubic spline model, respectively.
2/ 📊 Our study involved 664 participants, with a mean age of 48 at baseline and 70 at the time of MRI. We observed that while diet quality (measured using the Alternative Healthy Eating Index-2010 score) remained stable over 11 years, WHR increased nonlinearly 📈 over 21 years.
I'm thrilled to share our study, on the longitudinal impact of diet quality and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) on 🧠 brain health in ageing, which has now been published in JAMA Network Open! - supervised by @sanasuri.bsky.social @oxxpat.bsky.social & @mkflugge.bsky.social jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
@mpicbs.bsky.social
We cannot publish participants’ data itself because it is part of HCP (but you can apply for access here: www.humanconnectome.org). But source data for the figures, including the parcellation and the code is available here: osf.io/bq3fd
Thanks for reading until here, we hope you enjoyed this thread!
Thank you so much to my amazing DPhil supervisors, the @HumanConnectome team and the reviewers (Seiki Konishi, Martin Paulus and Philipp Säman) who made this paper better.
The advantage of looking at a small, circumscribed network is that it might be possible, in the future, to alter affected hypothalamus networks using targeted interventions, e.g. using transcranial ultrasonic neurostimulation, in patients struggling with stress disorders.
We characterised hypothalamus connectivity at the scale of its individual subnuclei. Our stress predictions were behaviourally specific and improved by nucleus level anatomical resolution (as opposed to whole hypothalamus resolution).
Rather than identifying an extensive network for maximal prediction accuracy, we focused on a small network centred on the hypothalamus which involved less than 2% of brain ordinates and 0.0015% of brain edges.
We show using multiple robust and replicable analyses that it is possible to relate nuclei-precise hypothalamus functional connectivity with other subcortical structures to stress in humans.
We did that by using i.e., questionnaire scores related to stress experienced over the last week, month or “in general” to obtain one dimensional marker of stress using factor analysis.
We then characterized these nuclei’s functional connectivity with other subcortical regions of interest, such as amygdala, and nuclei associated with brainstem neurotransmitter systems.
Because the hypothalamus contains anatomically and functionally distinct nuclei, we first created a detailed parcellation of the hypothalamus into seven distinct, replicable, nuclei based on resting-state data (available here: osf.io/bq3fd).
Here we used 3T and 7T resting-state fMRI data from nearly 500 people from the @HumanConnectome and examined whether hypothalamus functional connectivity relates to stress.
We already know the hypothalamus is a central brain region for processing stress, but not many studies have looked at the human hypothalamus because it is very tiny.
I'm extremely happy to share our study on hypothalamus functional connectivity & stress now out in @NatureComms - with Miriam Klein-Flügge, Sana Suri Klaus Ebmeier and Matthew Rushworth
@OxfordWIN @OxPsychiatry @OxExpPsy @UniofOxford @MPI_CBS
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
