What Menopause Does to Women’s Brains
Two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients are women. My foggy 53-year-old brain could help explain why.
Two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients are women. My foggy 53-year-old brain could help explain why.
In the case of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), the James Brown song is correct–this is a man’s world. Women are drastically more affected by the disease and its devastating effects, with over 60 percent of Americans currently diagnosed with AD being female. AD risk for women in their 60’s is double that of breast cancer. Women are also disproportionately the caregivers of those affected by AD, again totaling over 60% of care partners.
Previous seed grant helped UCI scientists secure nearly $2 million from National Institutes of Health for their Alzheimer’s research.
Midlife obesity may well be a cause of dementia. In contrast, behavioral changes due to preclinical disease could largely or wholly account for associations of low BMI, low caloric intake, and inactivity with dementia detection during the first decade of follow-up.
Doctors may be not be diagnosing women as early as men with brain problems associated with early signs of dementia because of how well women typically perform on simple memory tests.
Women in their 60s are twice as likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s as they are to develop breast cancer, per the Alzheimer’s Association.
Tau protein tangles, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, develop differently in women than in men, and spread faster and more easily in women.