ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Sex differences in healthy brain aging are unlikely to explain higher Alzheimer's disease prevalence in women.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Unhealthy fat distribution as a sex-specific predictor of declining hippocampus insulin sensitivity.Diabetologia · 2026Article
- Global and Medial Temporal MRI Morphometry in Alzheimer's Disease and Cognitively Normal Adults: A Retrospective Association Study.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Regional Brain Volume Variation Across Adulthood: A Cross-Sectional MRI Analysis of Age, Sex, and Hemispheric Asymmetry.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Fifteen years on: a review of the Cam-CAN study of the cognitive neuroscience of ageing.GeroScience · 2026Review
- Sex-dependent dopaminergic vulnerability may contribute to sex differences in Parkinson's disease risk.Brain communications · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
23 authors.
Funding
Abstract
As Alzheimer's disease (AD) is diagnosed more frequently in women, understanding the role of sex has become a key priority in AD research. However, despite aging being the primary risk factor for AD, it remains unclear whether men and women differ in the extent of brain decline with age. Using 12,638 longitudinal brain MRIs from 4,726 participants aged 17 to 95 y across 14 cohorts, we examined sex differences in structural brain changes over time, controlling for differences in head size. Men showed greater cortical thickness (CT) decline in the cuneus, lingual, parahippocampal, and pericalcarine regions; surface area decline in the fusiform and postcentral regions; and in older adults, greater subcortical decline in the caudate, nucleus accumbens, putamen, and pallidum. In contrast, women only showed greater surface area decline in the banks of the superior temporal sulcus and greater ventricular expansion in older adults. These results suggest that sex differences in age-related brain decline are unlikely to contribute to the higher AD diagnosis prevalence in women, necessitating research into alternative explanations.
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Registered trials
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