Researchers note that to treat Alzheimer’s disease, the effectiveness of drugs is not the same depending on the sex of the patient.
- Laboratory work has shown differences in response to treatments between male and female animals
- The effects of these differences are found in post-mortem analysis of human brains.
- Researchers call for further analysis of gender differences in Alzheimer’s disease that affects women more
Women and men are not equal when it comes to the disease, nor when it comes to its management. Canadian researchers have noted this in a study published in Science Signaling. In their work, carried out on Alzheimer’s disease, they analyzed the effect of a treatment designed to block a specific receptor in order to regulate learning and memory. Scientists find that this drug is ineffective in female mice while it works in males.
Observations on mice, confirmed in humans
“We have proven that at least one promising treatment for Alzheimer’s disease is effective in male mice, but not in females”, summarizes the lead author of the study, Dr. Khaled Abdelrahman. For him, this discovery will have important consequences in research on this disease. In the second part of the research, the scientists studied brain tissue from human donors who died of Alzheimer’s disease.
They note that differences in the effectiveness of treatments according to sex also exist in humans. “We must be careful when developing medical studiesinsists the scientist. Many drugs have different or even opposite effects depending on gender. All treatments that work for men don’t work for women, and vice versa.” For him, medical data must now be analyzed differently, taking these differences into account.
Why does Alzheimer’s disease strike more women?
This is not the first time that a researcher has called for sex-differentiated studies for Alzheimer’s disease. “As women are more affected by the disease, the specific differences between men and women need to be investigated.” had alerted the co-founder of the international organization Women’s Brain Project, Antonella Santuccione-Chadha, in July 2018. The organization conducted a meta-analysis of work done on dementia to understand the reasons for the different incidence of the disease according to sex. This research has shown that age is an important factor: women have a better longevity, but the risk of developing the pathology increases with age. The cause could also be hormonal: the fall of hormones associated with menopause could weaken them.Estrogen has a protective effect on the brain, which disappears when its rate decreases, past this stage of life, women therefore no longer have protection against the disease.In France, they account for 60% of the 900,000 cases of Alzheimer’s.
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