Gender differences in Alzheimer's disease may be linked to tau spread

  • Brain scans suggest that tau proteins may spread more rapidly through women’s brains, increasing Alzheimer's risk and speeding its progression.

Accumulating evidence suggests that tau spreads through brain tissue like an infection, traveling from neuron to neuron and turning other proteins into abnormal tangles, subsequently killing brain cells.

A new study using brain scans of healthy individuals and patients with MCI has found that the architecture of tau networks is different in men and women, with women having a larger number of regions that connect various communities in the brain. This difference may allow tau to spread more easily between regions, boosting the speed at which it accumulates and putting women at greater risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-07/vumc-rap071619.php

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/16/research-why-alzheimers-more-likely-women-than-men-tau-protein

Gender & APOE status affects tau accumulation

A study involving 131 cognitively healthy older adults (mean age 77) and 97 with MCI, found that women with MCI who were ApoE ε4 carriers were more susceptible than men to tau accumulation in the brain. However, no gender differences were found among the cognitively healthy adults.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/sonm-ads062419.php

Reference: 

The findings of the first study were presented at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference July 14-18, 2019, in Los Angeles.

The second study was presented by Manish Paranjpe at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI), Abstract 253: "Sex Modulates the ApoE ε4 Effect on Tau 18F-AV-1451 PET Imaging in Individuals with Normal Aging and Mild Cognitive Impairment," Manish Paranjpe, Min Liu, Ishan Paranjpe, Rongfu Wang, Tammie Benzinger and Yun Zhou.

Related News

Stressors in middle age linked to cognitive decline in older women

Data from some 900 older adults has linked stressful life experiences among middle-aged women, but not men, to greater memory decline in later life.

Data from 1,215 older adults, of whom 173 (14%) were African-American, has found that, although brain scans showed no significant differences between black and white participants,

A study involving 88 women, some of whom had endocrinological disorders, has found that, while some hormones were associated with changes across one menstrual cycle in some of the women taking part, these effects didn't repeat in the following cycle.

Analysis of data from more than 8,000 people, most of them older than 60, has revealed that, among the 5,000 people initially tested cognitively normal, carrying one copy of the “Alzheimer’s gene” (ApoE4) only slightly increased men’s risk of developing

Contradicting some earlier studies, new research using data from the very large and long-running Nurses' Health Study has found that calcium supplement intake was not associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease in women.

Type 2 diabetes greatly increases a person's risk of developing cardiovascular disease, but a new study shows that cardiovascular risk factors such as elevated blood pressure and cholesterol levels differ significantly between men and women with diabetes.

A rat study has found that infant males have more of the Foxp2 protein (associated with language development) than females and that males also made significantly more distress calls than females.

Evidence against an evolutionary explanation for male superiority in spatial ability coves from a review of 35 studies covering 11 species: cuttlefish, deer mice, horses, humans, laboratory mice, meadow voles, pine voles, prairie voles, rats, rhesus macaques and talastuco-tucos (a type of burrow

Being a woman of a certain age, I generally take notice of research into the effects of menopause on cognition.

A large long-running New Zealand study has found that people who started using cannabis in adolescence and continued to use it for years afterward showed a significant decline in IQ from age 13 to 38. This was true even in those who hadn’t smoked marijuana for some years.

Pages

Subscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest health newsSubscribe to Latest news
Error | About memory

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.