Study: Memory problem worsens faster in women

WASHINGTON - Older women with mild memory impairment worsened about twice as fast as men, researchers reported Tuesday, part of an effort to unravel why women are especially hard-hit by Alzheimer's.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer's are women.

At age 65, seemingly healthy women have about a 1-in-6 chance of developing Alzheimer's during the rest of their lives, compared with 1 in 11 for men. Scientists once thought the disparity was just because women tend to live longer. But there's increasing agreement that something else makes women more vulnerable.

"Women are really at the epicenter of the Alzheimer's disease crisis," said Kristine Yaffe of the University of California, San Francisco. "We don't really understand what this is all about."

A series of studies presented Tuesday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference uncovered signs of that vulnerability well before Alzheimer's symptoms hit.

In one study, Duke University researchers compared nearly 400 men and women with mild cognitive impairment, early memory changes that don't interfere with everyday activities but that mark an increased risk for developing Alzheimer's. They measured these people's cognitive abilities over an average of four years and as long as eight years for some participants.

The men's scores on an in-depth test of memory and thinking skills declined a point a year, while the women's dropped by two points a year.

Age, education level, and even whether people carried the ApoE-4 gene that increases the risk of late-in-life Alzheimer's couldn't account for the difference, said Duke medical student Katherine Lin, who coauthored the study with psychiatry professor P. Murali Doraiswamy. The study wasn't large or long enough to tell if women were more at risk for progressing to full dementia.

Nor could it explain why the women declined faster; the researchers said larger studies should start analyzing gender differences for more clues.