China News Service, Wuhan, March 3 (Yang Cen) In the early morning of March 3, Beijing time, the latest issue of "Nature" published online a research paper by Xiong Jing, deputy chief physician of the Department of Neurology, People's Hospital of Wuhan University, as the first author. revealed that follicle-stimulating hormone is the reason why older women are more susceptible to Alzheimer's disease.
Xiong Jing has long been engaged in basic research and clinical diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases in the elderly. In 2018, she went overseas to study the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease.
She introduced that epidemiological surveys have shown that the number of female Alzheimer's disease patients in the elderly is about twice that of male patients, but the cause of this phenomenon has not been known.
Ye Keqiang, the corresponding author of the paper and a professor at the School of Life and Health, Shenzhen University of Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (under preparation), has been devoted to the research on the pathogenesis, early diagnosis and drug development of neurodegenerative diseases for many years. , put forward the original theory: the activation of C/EBPβ-AEP pathway is the core driving factor leading to neurodegenerative diseases.
Based on this theory, researchers such as Xiong Jing conducted research on hormones whose concentrations in women before and after menopause changed sharply, and carried out related experiments.
It was found that elevated follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) is an important reason why older women are more susceptible to Alzheimer's disease than men.
Xiong Jing explained that during the perimenopausal period, the content of follicle-stimulating hormone in the body of women increased sharply to more than 10 times, while the level of follicle-stimulating hormone in older men increased by about 3 times compared to when they were young.
The sharply elevated follicle-stimulating hormone in premenopausal women aggravates the Aβ and Tau lesions in the brain of Alzheimer's disease patients by activating the C/EBPβ-AEP signaling pathway, resulting in memory impairment.
According to reports, this discovery not only provides a new cause and mechanism for why women are more prone to Alzheimer's disease, but also provides a new target for early clinical screening and intervention of Alzheimer's disease.
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