With partial seed funding from the University of Oklahoma’s Data Institute for Societal Challenges (DISC), work from Yuan Yang, Ph.D., an OU-Tulsa assistant professor in the Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, has been published in Frontiers Media, one of the world’s largest research publications.
The study, “Sex differences in brain functional connectivity of hippocampus in mild cognitive impairment,” was designed to extend researchers’ understanding of the mechanism underlying sex-related differences in the brains of participants with mild cognitive impairment — the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are 6.5 million people in the United States currently living with Alzheimer’s disease. Females constitute more than two-thirds of this population because of several factors, including greater longevity than males, genetics, hormonal differences, rates of depression, education level, and sleep disturbances. Females also experience greater cognitive deterioration than males in the same disease stage, perform worse on a variety of neuropsychological tasks and have greater total brain atrophy and temporal lobe degeneration.
The hippocampus is also known to be affected at the earliest stages of mild cognitive impairment, even before a diagnosis can be made. According to similar research, atrophy of the hippocampus has been found to affect the progression of Alzheimer’s disease only in females.
“The overall goal of this research is to develop and validate imaging biomarkers for sex differences in mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer’s disease using an advanced machine learning approach and a large-scale, multisite dataset,” Yang said.
Understanding these sex differences may aid in the development of sex-specific precision medicines that decrease the progression of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease.
“This publication will pave the way for future research and design of sex-specific intervention strategies, including e-health devices or virtual reality environments to prevent age-related cognitive declines,” Yang said.
