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Experts Aim to Find Out Why Alzheimer’s Disease Affects Twice as Many Women as Men
Consensus recommendations will help guide future AD research (Sept. 5)
According to a September 5 announcement from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, a group of experts has developed consensus recommendations for future research directions to determine why nearly two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are women.
The recommendations were published in a roundtable discussion in the Journal of Women’s Health. The article is available free on the journal’s website.
An estimated 5.4 million Americans are affected by AD and related dementias, and that number will likely rise to 11 million to 16 million people by the year 2050 if no effective cures or preventive measures are developed, the announcement said. The main risk factors for AD are age and sex, with affected women outnumbering men 2 to 1. This may be due at least in part to the fact that women tend to live longer.
An interdisciplinary roundtable of experts convened by the Society for Women’s Health Research, based in Washington, D.C., developed a set of recommendations to help guide future AD research and to make the evaluation of sex and gender differences a component of future studies. The consensus recommendations encompass seven themes, including the need to assess the link between sex and the incidence of AD; to raise awareness of sex differences among the research community; and to take into account sex-based differences in the experimental design and data analysis of studies on disease risk, early diagnosis, and drug discovery.
For more information, visit the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. Web site.
