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According to an article in the Archives of General Psychiatry, investigators sought to determine whether there is a relation between levels of Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology, clinical symptoms of AD and differences in men and women.
In a longitudinal clinicopathologic study of aging and AD using annual clinical evaluations and brain donation at death, analyses were conducted on 64 men and 77 women. Women were slightly older at death than men; four cortical regions of the brain were counted, and a global measure of AD was derived.
Scientists found women had more global AD pathology than did men due primarily to more neurofibrillary tangles. On a global measure of AD pathology that ranged from 0 to three, each additional unit of pathology increased the odds of clinical AD nearly three-fold in men compared with more than 20-fold in women. The findings suggest that AD pathology is more likely to be expressed clinically as dementia in women than in men. Our results suggest that the clinical manifestation of AD is stronger in women than in men.
Understanding why the association between AD pathology and dementia differs in men and women could yield important clues about the pathophysiology of AD or eventually lead to sex-specific preventive or therapeutic strategies. An alternate suggestion is that women may have a relative lack of some protective factor, such as the estrogen deficiency of postmenopausal women, which could increase their vulnerability to AD pathology.
Clearly more research is needed to explore these and other possibilities.
Medline info on gender and alzheimer's disease
10:47:37 PM 
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