In Dr. Walker’s link between sleep and Alzheimer’s, he found that sleep deprivation and beta-amyloid build up starts damaging the brain as much as 20 years before major lapses in memory occur.
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“There’s something else going on in terms of the biology [or] the environment for women”, Yaffe says.
Toward this goal, the Alzheimer’s Association is conducting a campaign – the Women’s Alzheimer’s Research Initiative – to raise $5 million; the Association plans to award a series of research grants specific to gender-related issues in Alzheimer’s and other dementias. The researchers couldn’t tell why, or if the women were more likely to worsen to full dementia. Tuesday, researchers reported that here again, women are at higher risk of getting worse.
They observed that people who spend extensive hours watching television – that is about four hours per day or more scored pretty low when cognitive performance during the middle age was measured.
There was a clear difference between men and women, regardless of their age, says Michael Weiner of UCSF, the study’s senior author.
“Our findings suggest that men and women at risk for Alzheimer’s may be having two very different experiences”, explains Lin. Women also have metabolic differences, she said, and it may be that women are affected differently by diet and exercise than men are.
While there are clinically available technologies to detect changes to the brain and some treatments for the neurodegenerative disease, they target a more advanced stage of Alzheimer’s. Visit www.alz.org or call 800.272.3900.
The looming threat of Alzheimer’s disease can be terrifying, especially if you have a family history. Women make up about two-thirds of Americans with the disease.
The saliva test was presented at the 2015 Alzheimer’s Association global Conference in Washington this week. But at a press conference at the Alzheimer’s meeting, Kristine Yaffe, of the University of California, San Francisco, said that view is changing.
Katherine Lin of Duke University and colleagues studied 400 people with mild cognitive impairment – a loss of memory and thinking skills that doesn’t yet strongly affect someone’s life but that can become Alzheimer’s.
The researchers found that the rate of decline in men was 1.05 points per year, in women it was 2.3 points per year. It found that men who were exposed to general anesthesia during surgery declined faster on measures of cognitive performance and daily activity than men who had not had surgery; women who underwent surgery with anesthesia also declined faster than women who did not.
HAMILTON: So many women who had subtle memory problems at the beginning of the study had major deficits by the end.
Dr. Luca Giliberto, an Alzheimer’s investigator at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y., mentioned another theory: “Women may have better cognitive reserve than men Giliberto said”.
MICHAEL WEINER: Overall, women had more amyloid in their brain than men. Thanks to a new study, there is a test using saliva which could detect Alzheimer’s disease early that may soon be easily available.
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“While more research is needed to determine why this happens, we believe that additional years in education or more challenging occupations can increase the number of connections between brain cells”.
