Study: Women with mild memory problem worsen faster than men

WASHINGTON -- Older women with mild memory impairment worsened about twice as fast as men, researchers reported Tuesday as part of an effort to unravel why women are especially hard-hit by Alzheimer's.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer's are women.

At age 65, seemingly healthy women have about a 1 in 6 chance of developing Alzheimer's during the rest of their lives, compared with a 1 in 11 chance for men. Scientists once thought the disparity was because women tend to live longer, but there's increasing agreement something else makes women more vulnerable.

"Women are really at the epicenter of the Alzheimer's disease crisis," said Dr. Kristine Yaffe of the University of California, San Francisco. "We don't really understand what this is all about."

A series of studies presented Tuesday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference uncovered signs of that vulnerability well before Alzheimer's symptoms hit.

First, Duke University researchers compared nearly 400 men and women with mild cognitive impairment, early memory changes that don't interfere with everyday activities but mark an increased risk for developing Alzheimer's. They measured participants' cognitive abilities over an average of four years and as long as eight years for some.

The men's scores on an in-depth test of memory and thinking skills declined a point a year, while the women's scores dropped by two points a year.

Age, education levels and even whether people carried the ApoE-4 gene that increases the risk of late-in-life Alzheimer's couldn't account for the difference, said Duke medical student Katherine Lin, who coauthored the study with Duke psychiatry professor Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy. The study wasn't large or long enough to tell whether women were more at risk for progressing to full dementia.

Nor could it explain why the women declined faster, but the researchers said larger Alzheimer's prevention studies should start analyzing gender differences for more clues. And two other studies presented Tuesday offered additional hints of differences in women's brains.

A sample of 1,000 participants in the large Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative compared PET scans to see how much of a sticky protein called beta-amyloid was building up in the brains of a variety of men and women -- some healthy, some at risk and others with full-blown Alzheimer's. Amyloid plaques are a hallmark of Alzheimer's, and growing levels can help indicate who's at risk before symptoms ever appear.

Some seniors who undergo surgery while knocked out by general anesthesia suffer lasting cognitive problems afterward, often expressed to doctors as, "Grandma was never the same after that operation." Here again, women are at higher risk of getting worse, researchers reported Tuesday.