FNIH has joined with the Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer’s Initiative to announce the first-ever challenge to identify male/female differences in the development and presentation of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).The winning submissions to the Geoffrey Beene Global NeuroDiscovery Challenge will share $100,000 in prize awards.

AD touches millions of people worldwide. Aside from the personal costs to patients who lose their intellect, their ability to communicate, their independence and their dignity, and to their families who are often burdened with tremendous caregiving responsibilities, AD is currently estimated to cost $215 billion annually.  These numbers and costs will continue to rise as the world’s population ages.

Although it is not yet clear whether gender disparity in AD results from women’s longer lifespans, evidence is building that the destructive physical changes and atrophy in the brain, how those changes translate into physical symptoms, and the influences of genetics and hormones on the development of the disease is different in women and men.  The objective of the Challenge is to generate novel hypotheses addressing the causes and consequences of such differences.

AD is especially important to women because almost two thirds of AD patients are women.  The Challenge will intensify the search for answers to questions about why women have more neurofibrillary tangles than men; why women’s brains shrivel at a faster rate than men; why studies point to greater inheritance of AD from the mother’s, rather than the father’s side; why female carriers of a gene that is a strong risk factor for AD have significantly more memory disruption over time than men.

Understanding the gender differences in AD will help make possible new and better ways to detect, treat and prevent the disease for both women and men around the globe.