High-fat diet prompts immune cells to start eating connections between neurons

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-11/mcog-hdp112315.php

Public Release: 23-Nov-2015
High-fat diet prompts immune cells to start eating connections between neurons
Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University

When a high-fat diet causes us to become obese, it also appears to prompt normally bustling immune cells in our brain to become sedentary and start consuming the connections between our neurons, scientists say.

The good news is going back on a low-fat diet for just two months, at least in mice, reverses this trend of shrinking cognitive ability as weight begins to normalize, said Dr. Alexis M. Stranahan, neuroscientist in the Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia.

"Microglia eating synapses is contributing to synapse loss and cognitive impairment in obesity," Stranahan said. "On the one hand, that is very scary, but it's also reversible, meaning that if you go back on a low-fat diet that does not even completely wipe out the adiposity, you can completely reverse these cellular processes in the brain and maintain cognition."

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She notes that the high-fat-eating mice actually ate less chow and consumed the same amount of calories as mice eating low fat. "The entire metabolic phenotype is driven by diet composition rather than the amount of calories," Stranahan said.

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