People who didn’t have type 2 diabetes but had blood sugar at the high end of the normal range performed worse on memory tests than those with lower blood sugar, a study out Wednesday shows.
Researchers in Germany recruited 141 people, average age 63, who did not have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, and they showed no signs of memory problems. The study participants took a series of memory tests and had their blood sugar tested. They also had brain scans to measure the size of the hippocampus area, which plays an important role in memory.
Researcher Agnes Flöel of Charité University Medicine in Berlin says she and her colleagues "correlated long-term blood-sugar levels with the number of words people could recall on a memory test." She says they found that higher long-term blood-sugar levels went along with being able to recall fewer words.
"We also found that people with higher blood-sugar levels had smaller volumes in the size of their hippocampus," she says.
Flöel says the findings, reported in the medical journal Neurology, published by the American Academy of Neurology, suggest that even for people within the normal range of blood sugar, lowering their levels might be a possible way to prevent memory problems as they age.
She points out that the study is relatively small and doesn’t prove cause and effect. There’s a need for large clinical trials to test whether lowering glucose will help with the prevention of dementia, she says.