Why women pay a higher cognitive price for Alzheimer’s tau
A meta-analysis across three independent cohorts reveals a significant sex difference in how tau pathology affects cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease. While women typically show a cognitive advantage at low levels of tau, this shifts to a vulnerability at higher burdens. Specifically, elevated tau in the medial and lateral temporal regions, as measured by PET imaging, predicts a faster rate of cognitive decline in women than in men, even after accounting for amyloid burden.
Why it might matter to you:
This finding underscores the importance of sex as a biological variable in neurodegenerative disease progression, a critical consideration for designing preclinical models and clinical trials. For a researcher focused on pain and neurobiology, understanding these sex-specific pathways in Alzheimer’s could inform analogous investigations into how sex differences modulate other central nervous system processes, including pain perception and placebo responses. It highlights a broader imperative to integrate demographic factors into mechanistic research to improve translational outcomes.
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