Scientists at Scripps Research and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found a clue to the molecular cause of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which may also explain why women are at greater risk for the disease than men.
The team found that a particularly harmful, chemically modified form of an inflammatory immune protein called complement C3 was present at much higher levels in the brains of women who had died with AD, compared with the brains of men who had died with the disease. The results also showed that estrogen—levels of which drop during menopause—normally protects against the production of this form of complement C3.
