Alzheimer does not behave the same with women as with men

BarcelonaAlthough two out of three Alzheimer's patients are women, sex has not been considered a key variable in the research of this disease, which still has no cure. With the aim of trying to fill this gap, researchers from the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS) have studied the behavior of three neurodegenerative diseases in men and women and have discovered relevant differences in the blood proteins of people with Alzheimer's. Sometimes the cells in our body produce an excess of certain proteins when we get sick, and in the case of women, they have observed that when they have Alzheimer's, they present a higher number of proteins in their blood than men, which opens the door in the future to designing personalized treatments with a gender perspective.

The authors of the research, published this Friday in the journal Alzheimer's Research & Therapy, have analyzed 120 proteins in blood and cerebrospinal fluid from 359 people, including healthy individuals and people with Alzheimer's, Lewy body dementia, or frontotemporal dementia. It is one of the first to systematically analyze sex differences in multiple types of dementia using blood and cerebrospinal fluid samples. The results show that in the three dementias studied, women present many more overexpressed proteins (which is when a cell produces them in excess) than men, and most of these are related to inflammatory processes.

“It seems that women have more affected inflammatory processes, which suggests that these could play a particularly relevant role in the development of the disease in women,” explains researcher Aina Comas, co-first author of the article. Therefore, they believe that identifying these differences can help develop more specific and effective therapeutic strategies for each patient. “Our results indicate that Alzheimer's is not exactly the same in men and women,” states Albert Lladó, a researcher at the Alzheimer's disease and other cognitive disorders research group at IDIBAPS and one of those responsible for the study.

Studying with a gender perspective

For the researcher Anna Antonell, who is another of the leaders of the research, it is important that clinical trials on cognitive diseases include both men and women to advance the knowledge of these differences that they describe in their work. This 2026 there have already been other scientific articles that have echoed that Alzheimer's does not behave in the same way between men and women, in the same line as the conclusions of the IDIBAPS research, which is why Antonell believes that there is growing awareness in researching in this direction. "I would like in five years to have more answers about sex differences in Alzheimer's disease. It is a slow path, and translating it into treatments I see even further away, but we must continue," concludes the researcher.