A Mayo Clinic study published in JAMA Network Open found that in women with Alzheimer's disease, disease progression could be up to 20 times faster if they also had abnormal levels of a protein associated with Parkinson's disease. This research sheds light on a long-observed disparity: women account for nearly two-thirds of people living with Alzheimer's in the U.S. Mayo Clinic researchers used advanced neuroimaging techniques to demonstrate that coexisting pathologies disproportionately affect the female brain. The team analyzed data from 415 participants and found that among those with Alzheimer's pathology and alpha-synuclein abnormalities, women accumulated tau significantly faster than men with the same coexisting protein changes. This pattern was not observed in men. "When we see disease-related changes evolving at such different paces, we cannot continue to address Alzheimer's as if it behaves exactly the same in everyone," says Dr. Kejal Kantarci, the study's senior author. "Recognizing these specific sex differences could help us design more targeted clinical trials and, ultimately, more personalized treatment strategies." Dr. Elijah Mak, the study's first author, notes: "This opens up a completely new direction for understanding why women bear a disproportionate burden of dementia." Researchers are now examining whether these specific sex effects also appear in patients with Lewy body dementia, where alpha-synuclein is the primary driver of the disease rather than a coexisting pathology.
