Genetic and Hormonal Components of Sex Differences in Alzheimer’s Disease

Description

In this webinar, Dr. Buckley presents the sex differences in dementia, focusing on diagnosis, tauopathy, and implications for clinical trials.

This presentation highlights the state of play in the literature with regard to sex differences in prevalence and incidence rates of dementia. Dr. Buckley touches upon the well characterized issue of women being underdiagnosed with dementia due to the fact that they perform much better than men on many neuropsychological tests. She presents her work that has shown consistently, and across many independent cohorts, that women show elevated levels of tauopathy in the brain relative to men. After demonstrating these sex differences in these clinical AD-related outcomes, she turns to the question of whether they might be driven by sex steroid hormones or the X chromosome. She ends the talk by touching upon the reasons why we care about sex differences, particularly from a clinical trials perspective. In addition, she presents her working framework for where she thinks the field stands and what gaps remain in the literature.

Key Topics Include:

• The extent to which sex differences exist in Alzheimer’s disease risk

• How sex steroid hormones and the X chromosome play a role in moderating this risk

• Understand the importance of sex disaggregating findings, both in observational research and also in clinical trials

Presenter: Rachel Buckley, PhD - Associate Professor, Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital.