Leg Length and Cognitive Reserve
I recently mentioned the "Barker Hypothesis" which says that fetal malnutrition is associated with many physical problems later in life.
Well the difficulties may not only be physical.
I would like to tell you about an important concept that we call "Cognitive reserve." This can be thought of as our cognitive resilience. This first came to light almost twenty years ago when a post-mortem study of 137 elderly people was published in the Annals of Neurology, and confirmed something that we had suspected for years: there was a large discrepancy between the degree of Alzheimer’s disease neuropathology and the clinical manifestations of the disease. Some people had extensive pathology but they clinically had no or very little manifestations of the disease. The investigators also showed that these people had higher brain
weights and greater number of neurons compared with age-matched
controls. This lead to the idea that they had a greater "reserve." This is why building your brain throughout life is thought to reduce the ce of cognitive impaitrment later on.
Studies have shown that childhood cognition, educational attainment and adult occupation all independently contribute to cognitive reserve, and more recently it has been confirmed that education and the complexity of a person’s occupation may both slow the rate of decline in people who already have Alzheimer’s disease.
Although height is in part genetically determined, shorter leg length has been found to be associated with an adverse environment in early childhood. In a recent study of older Afro-Caribbean people living in London, shorter leg length was significantly associated with cognitive impairment, leading to the suggestion that shorter leg length may be a marker of early life stressors that then result in reduced cognitive reserve.
It is also worth recalling our discussion about the association between growth hormone and intelligence in children and between intelligence and head size.
And nutrition is one of the determinants of growth hormone synthesis and release.
Naturally this does not mean that less tall people will all get Alzheimer’s disease. But these observations have a number of practical consequences. They re-emphasize the importance of good nutrition during pregnancy: something that is simply not available to over a third of the world’s population. They also help us to identify some of the people who would most benefit from strategies to increase their cognitive reserve and to avoid some of the things that can strip it away from them.
Dr. Richard G. Petty, MD is a world-renowned authority on the brain, and his revolutionary work on human energy systems has been acclaimed around the globe.
He is also an accredited specialist in internal and metabolic medicine, endocrinology, psychiatry, acupuncture and homeopathy. He has been an innovator and leader of the human potential movement for over thirty years and is also an active researcher, teacher, writer, professional speaker and broadcaster. He is the author of five books, including the groundbreaking and best selling CD series Healing, Meaning and Purpose. He has taught in over 45 countries and 48 states in the last ten years, but spends as much time as possible on his horse farm in Georgia.
