Women with mild memory problem worsen

“This study shows women have more amyloid in their brain than men, in general, and especially once the women are in the late stages where they’re having dementia”.

Elderly women also have a greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s than men if they’ve had surgery and general anesthesia, the other study found.

Kristine Yaffe, a professor of psychiatry, neurology and epidemiology at the University of California in San Francisco, said the results have important implications for children and young adults, who are more than ever glued to the screens of electronic gadgets as part of a sedentary life at home and in the workplace. In Sweden, Karolinska Institute researchers tracked down seniors’ extended-in the past report playing cards to obtain that faculty performance at age nine or 10 predicted who was presently constructing a improved “cognitive reserve” to guard versus later on-in-lifetime decline.

“Earlier diagnosis or, better still, the ability to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s, would significantly increase the window of opportunity a person with Alzheimer’s has to formulate an informed response to the news and empower them to be an active participant in decision-making while they still have the ability”. But the study’s major finding was that women had higher accumulations of the abnormal protein in their brains, regardless of whether or not they carried the APOE4 gene.

Sleep apnea, brief interruptions of breathing that repeatedly awaken people without them realizing, caused a almost two-fold increase in that risk, Yaffe said.

Alzheimer’s distinguishing features include the buildup of abnormal proteins that destroy brain cells in areas critical to memory and learning.

In 2015, an estimated 5.3 million Americans of all ages suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. The study was to be presented Sunday at the annual Alzheimer’s Association global Conference, held from July 18-23 in Washington, D.C. Scientists once thought the disparity was just because women tend to live longer — but there’s increasing agreement that something else makes women more vulnerable.

Katherine Amy Lin, Wrenn Clinical Research Scholar in Alzheimer’s disease, Duke University Medical Center, and colleagues used data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) to study how the cognitive abilities of about 400 people with MCI (141 women, 257 men), mostly in their mid-seventies, changed over the course of up to eight years.

Lastly, the study findings also showed that women declined faster than men following surgery under general anesthesia.

HAMILTON: So many women who had subtle memory problems at the beginning of the study had major deficits by the end.

Schenning didn’t have amyloid measurements for these people; other studies have suggested that the people most at risk may have brewing cognitive problems already.

“Overall, women have more amyloid than men”, even among the cognitively normal group, said Dr. Michael Weiner of the University of California, San Francisco. Sleep disruption could be one of the missing pieces in the puzzle of how a protein called beta-amyloid starts its damage long before people have trouble with memory, researchers reported.

HAMILTON: Which points to a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s.