From Anxiety to Alzheimer’s: Changing hormones and chronic stress wreak havoc on the body—but you can fight back.
The following written content by Meghan Rabbitt
The alarm bells started going off for neuroscientist Roberta Diaz Brinton, Ph.D., three decades ago, when she saw just how hard women in particular were being hit by Alzheimer’s disease. Consider these current stats: Nearly two-thirds of patients diagnosed with the brain disorder are women—a staggering one in five of us will be diagnosed by the time we’re 65—and by 2050, as many as 9 million women may end up with the disease. It’s even worse for African Americans, who are two to three times as likely as non-Hispanic whites to develop Alzheimer’s.
But when Brinton, the director of the Center for Innovation in Brain Science at the University of Arizona (and whose work has been supported for years by the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement), went looking for answers, she found the status quo response to these stats unsatisfying at best and maddening at worst.
“I kept hearing over and over that it was because women live longer than men,” she says. “But we only live about four and a half years longer. That does not explain our twofold greater lifetime risk.”
It also doesn’t explain why a number of other brain-health issues affect women far more than men: Women are twice as likely as men to develop certain types of brain tumors, nearly twice as likely to deal with depression, and three times as likely to get headaches. We’re also much more likely to have a stroke and to develop an autoimmune disorder that affects the brain like multiple sclerosis.
So Brinton and a number of her colleagues around the world started focusing on what might be going on specifically in women’s brains—beyond aging and unlucky genes—to lead to such higher rates of brain disease. Read more from Prevention. Tips to protect your brain, too.
