How maternity "protects" women against the development of Alzheimer's disease or dementia



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Women make up about 60% of patients with Alzheimer's disease in the United States, and you are almost twice as likely as a man to develop this disease.

However, new scientific data has offered some intriguing hypotheses, suggesting that hormonal influences or pregnancy-related changes in the immune system (or both) may increase the risk of dementia in one direction or in one's life. ;other.

In a study that followed nearly 15 thousand women in US .US. From middle age to advanced age, researchers found that women who gave birth to three or more children were less likely to develop dementia than those who had only one child. only one.

Reporting on their findings at the International Conference of Alzheimer's Assn in Chicago, the authors of the new study also said that women whose lifetime fertility was lower seemed more likely to develop dementia than those who had started menstruating earlier. The data provide an early clue that hormones, especially estrogens, can exert some influence on a woman's risk of dementia.

Other research presented as part of the conference, from the pregnancy stories of 133 British women have provided evidence that the likelihood that a woman develops dementia decreases as she develops. increases the number of months that she has been pregnant.

New Approach

For decades, researchers have badumed that women are more likely that men develop dementia because they were more likely than men to survive until old age . As an aging disease, according to his reasoning, dementia is more likely to affect bad for longer.

However, new research indicates that women, who have evolved to spend much of their fertile years during pregnancy, could have accumulated protections against dementia for a long time. But as families have become smaller, women have lived longer and their reproductive years have been a minor part of their lives, so it is possible that the risk of women's dementia has increased.

Suzanne Craft, a professor of geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University, described the new studies as an important first step in understanding the risk of dementia in women. Studies that badyze women's life histories can generate hypotheses about the mechanisms that lead to dementia or protect a woman's brain from its ravages, Craft said in a panel on new research


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