Alzheimer’s affects males and females differently

The same disease can present unevenly in moles males and in females. It also applies to the disease of Alzheimer’s: not only the women I am most affectedbut they also seem to be deep there metabolic differences and molecular in patients of both sexes. To remember it today, in the World Alzheimer’s Dayis one study recently published in the magazine Cell Reports and conducted by Italian researchers who underline how these discoveries could serve to advance in the direction of early diagnosis and to differentiate therapies.

The team, made up of scientists from the University of Milan and Milan-Bicocca, Insubria and Tor Vergata, analyzed post mortem brain samples of women and men with a normal aging cerebral and those of sufferers of Alzheimer’s. The aim was to highlight the molecular differences connected to the disease by probing molecules of rna, proteins and metabolites. Comparing these age-associated alterations with those that occur in Alzheimer’s disease, in fact, could lead to the development of new therapeutic strategies.

The researchers were able to confirm what had already emerged in part from previous studies: getting older the brain suffers metabolic changes involving in particular the metabolism of the glucose and of amino acids. The study then highlighted how deep there are differences between men and women both in the group of healthy controls and in that of patients, with certain mechanisms more accentuated and others decreased, but also how those same processes can be overturned in conditions of illness.

For example, a reporting mechanism leading to the insulin secretion (the hormone that regulates the concentration of glucose in the blood) is more active in women with normal brain aging than in healthy men, while the opposite occurs (i.e. the same path is decreased) in patients with Alzheimer’s. comparison to the male counterpart.

Interesting are the results on the amino acid metabolism – the most altered of all. The researchers’ attention was mainly focused on processes involving the amino acid serine. Serine, in fact, is involved in the production of an important neuromodulatorthe D-serineand the ratio of D-serine to total serine is considered a indicator of cognitive decline. In women this value changes at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and has been proposed as an early marker of the disease.

The results of the study, the authors argue, shed some light on the molecular implications of Alzheimer’s disease and how it “changes” between the two sexes, opening up the future possibility of intervening with innovative and differentiated therapeutic approaches.