Of the roughly 6.5 million Americans who currently have Alzheimer’s disease, 4 million are women. The extreme gender divide likely stems from biological and cultural factors, but attempts to decipher the genetic or hormonal risk factors of the neurodegenerative disease have yielded inconclusive results, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Now, a study published in Science Advances on December 14 offers a new clue: Brain samples taken from women who had Alzheimer’s disease are more likely than men’s to contain a particular post-translationally modified protein that the study links to Alzheimer’s pathology.
The experiment began with a search for S-nitrosylated proteins in samples taken from 40 postmortem brains, including those of men and women who had Alzheimer’s disease when they died as well as healthy controls. Protein S-nitrosylation (SNO) is a protein modification that study coauthor Stuart Lipton, a neurodegenerative medicine researcher at Scripps Research in California and one of the ...
