Why does Alzheimer's disease affect women more often?
Last reviewed: 17.10.2021
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Experts say that medicine is in dire need of new effective methods of fighting Alzheimer's, so why are scientists still unable to find the key to solving this problem? Or maybe they just are not looking there?
The cases of Alzheimer's disease in women are more often associated with the hormonal background of women, as well as with hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) in women more often than in the male half of humanity. However, all these are only assumptions, the exact answer is not yet known to researchers.
They wonder why women are more prone to this disease. On the brain of women, Alzheimer's disease affects much worse than men, whose brain, as it turned out, better resists this disease.
New research shows that the cause of high incidence among women is gender differences. And popular hormone replacement therapy, recommended in the case of this disease, can cause irreparable harm to the female body.
The differences in the structure of the brain in men and women have been known for a long time, it is only unclear why these fundamental characteristics, which can finally give a clue to Alzheimer's disease, are so often ignored.
Dr. Glenda Gillis, professor at the Department of Neuroendocrine Pharmacology at Imperial College in London, says that the gender gap between a man and a woman still needs to be studied. However, she is one of the few who believe that the key to the solution lies precisely in the differences between the sexes.
Researchers from the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found the same number of plexuses in the brain in representatives of both sexes. However, why the female organism is more susceptible to the disease than the male is unknown.
The female hormone estrogen is on defense, but, again, no one can understand why the symptoms of the disease are so different.
Studies of scientists at the British University in Hertfordshire confirmed that the male brain is much better than the female brains with progressive senile dementia, against which there is a decline in mental abilities.
A group of 828 men and 1,238 women tested for quality of occasional memory (which reproduces events of the past), as well as on the semantic memory that covered the current information.
Alzheimer's sufferers are significantly ahead of women in five areas of cognitive processes. First and foremost, this refers to the ability of mental perception and processing of external information.