“When sex influences the brain: implications for Alzheimer disease”

Excerpt

Issues of sex and gender are currently at the center of discussions of social and political expectations in many countries. While there is little that the discipline of neuropathology can contribute to those conversations, there are aspects of the biological impact of sex which intersect with disease mechanisms. There are well-established differences in the hormonal environment across our life spans. In various disease settings, probably most prominently for cardiovascular disease risk and symptomatology, there has been a range of work examining distinct patterns of clinical presentation, differences in detection of disease in clinical settings, and recommendations for varying types of management [3]. As a result of these observations and other data, several years ago, the US National Institutes of Health explicitly required all research applications to be assessed the extent to that they “account for the possible role of sex as a biological variable in vertebrate animal and human studies” as part of the review criteria [1]. Thus, there has been increasing recognition in the scientific community of the extent to which disease mechanisms and manifestations can be influenced by sex. …