New information about Alzheimer's disease and women has recently come out -- it's no longer a disease of old age.
- New study links Alzheimer's in women to menopause
- Changes in brain can begin in their 40s, 50s
Changes in the brain leading to memory loss and other problems begin when adults hit their 40s and 50s. And there's one way in particular that it's impacting women.
Every six months Karen Segal goes to Weill Cornell Medicine's Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic to undergo cognitive tests, brain scans, and have her exercise and diet routines analyzed.
She wants to help find a cure for Alzheimer's disease. Her mother has had it for 17 years, and her mother's father had it too. Segal is participating in a study exploring whether Alzheimer's can be prevented and to determine why twice as many women are diagnosed with it than men.
"If I don't do this and I don't encourage my friends to do this, how are we ever going to find a treatment or a cure? Is it menopause that's causing Alzheimer's or is it just the natural aging process?" Segal said.
By studying brain scans of 43 middle-aged women, including Segal, Dr. Lisa Mosconi has discovered a possible connection between menopause and Alzheimer's.
"If you're 40, 45, 50, you want your brain to be active on the scan. Instead, what we saw was that women who were in the pre-menopausal and post-menopausal stages showed reductions in their brain energy levels as compared to men of the same age," Dr. Mosconi said.
Mosconi suspects the loss of estrogen during menopause is a factor, leaving the brain more vulnerable to aging and Alzheimer's.
"The brain uses sugar, specifically glucose for energy. And estrogen is involved in the way that the brain burns the glucose, the sugar, to produce energy," she said.
If your brain does not burn glucose efficiently, you eventually start to have symptoms, like memory loss, depression, and hot flashes. Mosconi duplicated the findings in a second study and is now looking to expand her work.
The hope is that the findings will lead to more tailored treatments to address or prevent these brain changes.
For now, Segal's scans show no sign of Alzheimer's and she's determined to keep it that way.
"We know one thing for sure, we're never curing my mother, but we might have a chance at curing me. I'd rather be driving the bus than chasing the bus," Segal said.