| 23 Novembre 2017
Women comprise 72% of Alzheimer’s disease cases in the seven major markets (7MM) of the US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK and Japan, and this trend of higher proportion of cases in women is consistent throughout each of the 7MM, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.
In the 7MM as a whole, women make up 7.62 million cases while men make up only 2.98 million cases, corresponding to a 72% to 28% split between the sexes.
IMAGE FOR PUBLICATION: PLEASE CLICK HERE ‘Alzheimer’s Disease: Total prevalent cases 2016’
The most common explanation of this skew towards women is that women tend to live longer than men, and since Alzheimer’s disease prevalence increases with age, more women would develop the disease. However, when looking at incidence rates, women still have higher rates than men of the same age.
Kasey Fu, Healthcare Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “Other studies suggest that development of Alzheimer’s is related to heart disease, and since women have a higher risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease risk also is higher.
“Current studies are looking into whether biological and lifestyle factor differences between men and women can explain the large difference in prevalent cases between the sexes.”
