Older women currently have a 50% higher risk than men of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Several risk factors for this disease are already well known, such as cardiovascular disease, lack of sleep or poor diet. But it is the link between dementia and level of education that the Inserm researchers and the EpiAgeing team from the Center for Epidemiological and Statistical Research at the University of Paris were interested in.
As they explain in a study published in the Lancet public health, the current generation of very old people was born in the 1920s and 1940s. At that time, few women had access to higher education. And it is this inequality of yesterday that would influence the cognitive capacities of today. To test this hypothesis, they compared the cognitive capacities during aging of women and men according to their levels of education over several generations.
The good news is that since the 1960s, the doors of universities have been opened more widely and in a more equal way to women, so that the level of studies of the latter has ended up almost catching up with that of men. in developed countries. The cognitive abilities of women have improved and in the longer term, the researchers believe that the gender inequalities in the risk of dementia could decrease.
Two other hypotheses: genetic and biological
Another hypothesis to explain why women are more at risk of Alzheimer’s disease was presented in 2019 at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease held in Los Angeles. According to scientists, it is the genetic track that must be explored. At the University of Miami, researchers analyzed the genes of 30,000 people (half of them with Alzheimer’s disease, the other half without) and discovered four genes that seem linked to a different risk disease by sex. But now they need to do more research to find out how these genes affect Alzheimer’s risk.
While for researchers at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee (United States) the reason why there are more women than men with Alzheimer’s disease is due to the way in which the tau protein, a protein that destroys nerve cells, spreads in women’s brains. These researchers found that the tau protein networks in women with mild impairment were more diffuse and dispersed than in men, suggesting that more areas of the brain would be affected.
Source :
Sex differences and the role of education in cognitive ageing: analysis of two UK-based prospective cohort studiesLancet public health, January 2021
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