Overview

• In postmortem analyses, women with Down syndrome had higher levels of beta amyloid and phosphorylated tau than men at the same average age of Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
• The disparity was most pronounced in the occipital lobe, a brain region usually affected later in the disease.
• Protein measurements came from UC Irvine’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Brain Tissue Repository and the NIH NeuroBioBank.
• The NIH-supported findings highlight the need to adjust intervention schedules in clinical trials to reflect sex-based progression differences.
• Next steps include examining vascular integrity, white-matter connectivity and correlations with biomarkers collected during life to guide precision-medicine approaches.