Are Men More Prone To Alzheimer?

Implications of Recent Research on Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)

The key question these researches seek to uncover is whether gender factor is decisive in the progress of MCI. The importance of this question arises from the fact that MCI can be lead to Alzheimer or other signs of dementia which are serious conditions effecting an important segment of the elderly population. It is known that women generally live longer than men, but the article aims to explore whether they also retain their cognitive functions for a longer period.

A study conducted at Olmstead County, Minn. by experts from the Mayo Clinic suggests that men are more prone to MCI than women. Although past research has maintained that Alzheimer’s is more common in women, this recent study shows that men actually have a higher rate of developing MCI than women. While women appear to live free of cognitive impairment and only at later stages in their lives develop serious dementia or Alzheimer, men actually acquire MCI much earlier and live with it for a longer time.

“Men may experience cognitive decline earlier but stay in that stage longer, while women don’t see cognitive impairment until later in life but have an abrupt decline into dementia,”

There can be two reasons for this gender difference: First, women live longer and therefore they would be more likely to develop some sort of dementia later in life. Second, Heart diseases usually accompany Alzheimer’s stages, and it is men rather than women who are more susceptible to such cardiovascular complications. There are however, certain limits regarding the gender angle related to MCI-at least for the moment.

Dr. Gregory Jicha from Kentucky University stresses that age and education are more important factors, and furthermore, the Mayo Clinic study’s 2000 strong experiment group is not representative of the whole nation in terms of ethnicity. Still, the fact that one quarters of this study group did actually have some cognitive impairment points out to the extreme importance of this issue and the need for similar studies on the subject.

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