(Press-News.org) Omega fatty acids could protect against Alzheimer’s disease in women, new research has found.
Analysis of lipids – fat molecules that perform many essential functions in the body – in the blood found there was a noticeable loss of unsaturated fats, such as those that contain omega fatty acids, in the blood of women with Alzheimer’s disease compared to healthy women.
Scientists found no significant difference in the same lipid molecule composition in men with Alzheimer’s disease compared to healthy men, which suggests that those lipids have a different role in the disease according to sex. Fats perform important roles in maintaining a healthy brain, so this study could indicate why more women are diagnosed with the disease.
The study, published today in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association by scientists from King’s College London and Queen Mary University London, is the first to reveal the important role lipids could have in the risk for Alzheimer’s between the sexes.
Senior author Dr Cristina Legido-Quigley, from King’s College London, said: “Women are disproportionately impacted by Alzheimer’s Disease and are more often diagnosed with the disease than men after the age of 80. One of the most surprising things we saw when looking at the different sexes was that there was no difference in these lipids in healthy and cognitively impaired men, but for women this picture was completely different. The study reveals that Alzheimer's lipid biology is different between the sexes, opening new avenues for research.”
The scientists took plasma samples from 841 participants who had Alzheimer’s Disease, mild cognitive impairment and cognitively health controls and and were measured for brain inflammation and damage.
They used mass spectrometry to analyse the 700 individual lipids in the blood. Lipids are a group of many molecules. Saturated lipids are generally considered as ‘unhealthy’ or ‘bad’ lipids, while unsaturated lipid, which sometime contains omega fatty acids, are generally considered ‘healthy’.
Scientists saw a steep increase in lipids with saturation – the ‘unhealthy lipids’ – in women with Alzheimer’s compared to the healthy group. The lipids with attached omega fatty acids were the most decreased in the Alzheimer’s group.
Now, the scientists say there is a statistical indication that there is a causal link between Alzheimer’s Disease and fatty acids. But a clinical trial is necessary to confirm the link.
Dr Legido-Quigley added: “Our study suggests that women should make sure they are getting omega fatty acids in their diet – through fatty fish or via supplements. However, we need clinical trials to determine if shifting the lipid composition can influence the biological trajectory of Alzheimer’s Disease.”
Dr Asger Wretlind, first author of the study from King’s College London, said: “Scientists have known for some time that more women than men are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Although this still warrants further research, we were able to detect biological differences in lipids between the sexes in a large cohort, and show the importance of lipids containing omegas in the blood, which has not been done before. The results are very striking and now we are looking at how early in life this change occurs in women.”
Dr Julia Dudley, Head of Research at Alzheimer’s Research UK says: “In the UK, two in three people living with dementia are women. This could be linked to living longer, or other risk factors like social isolation, education, or hormonal changes from the menopause being at play.
“While this study shows that women with Alzheimer’s had lower levels of some unsaturated fats compared with men, further work is needed. This includes understanding the mechanisms behind this difference and finding out if lifestyle changes, including diet could have a role. Future research should also be carried out in a more ethnically diverse population to see if the same effect is seen.
“Understanding how the disease works differently in women could help doctors tailor future treatments and health advice. Alzheimer’s Research UK is proud to be funding this work that will bring us a step closer to a cure.”
The research was supported by funding from LundbeckFonden and Alzheimer's Research UK.
END
Omega-3’s could protect women against Alzheimer’s
2025-08-20
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Building a better database to detect designer drugs
2025-08-20
WASHINGTON, Aug. 20, 2025 — How do you identify something no one has a test for? Designer drugs replicate the effects of known, illicit drugs but evade law enforcement. The chemical structure variations that help these compounds avoid detection also make them unpredictable in the body — a quality that poses serious health consequences. Now, a research team has used computer modeling to create a database of predicted chemical structures for improved detection of designer drugs.
Jason Liang, a rising senior in the Science, Mathematics and Computer Science Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School, will present the team’s ...
Breast tumors tunnel into fat cells to fuel up. Can we stop them?
2025-08-20
UCSF scientists caught cancer cells in the act of breaking into fat cells and releasing their fat. The energy heist seems to be critical for the growth of deadly breast cancer.
When triple-negative breast cancer grows, the fat cells around it seem to shrink.
UCSF researchers have discovered that the cells of these tumors, which are among the deadliest types of breast cancer, build molecular tunnels, called gap junctions, into nearby fat cells. The tumor cells then send instructions that trigger the fat cells to release stores of energy that could feed the cancer.
Blocking the ...
Study finds heart health declining in older adults with certain cardiovascular diseases
2025-08-20
Research Highlights:
Based on the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 health metrics, cardiovascular health among older U.S. adults with certain cardiovascular diseases was suboptimal and declining.
Using 2013-2018 national health survey data for 3,050 adults ages 65 and older (with and without cardiovascular disease), researchers found that cardiovascular health dropped significantly among those with high blood pressure, stroke or heart failure.
The cardiovascular health gap between people with and without cardiovascular disease appears to be largely explained by differences ...
Earth System Models project the start of the Amazon dieback within the 21st century
2025-08-20
The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest. It harbors immense biodiversity and plays a crucial role in the global climate system by storing vast amounts of carbon in its vegetation (Figure 1). The Amazon is widely recognized as a major climate tipping element note 1(IPCC: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Continued deforestation and climate change could push the system past a critical threshold, causing the Amazon to shift from rainforest rich in biodiversity to a degraded savannah-like ecosystem. ...
New graphene technology matures brain organoids faster, may unlock neurodegenerative insights
2025-08-20
Researchers from University of California San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Institute have developed a novel method to stimulate and mature human brain organoids using graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon. Published in Nature Communications, the study introduces Graphene-Mediated Optical Stimulation (GraMOS), a safe, non-genetic, biocompatible, non-damaging way to influence neural activity over days to weeks. The approach accelerates brain organoid development — especially important for modeling age-related conditions like Alzheimer’s disease — and even allows them to control robotic devices in real time.
“This is a game-changer for brain ...
High-frequency molecular vibrations initiate electron movement
2025-08-20
Whether in solar cells or in the human eye: whenever certain molecules absorb light, the electrons within them shift from their ground state into a higher energy, excited state. This results in the transport of energy and charge, leading to charge separation and eventually to the generation of electricity. An international team of scientists led by Dr Antonietta De Sio and Prof. Dr. Christoph Lienau from the Ultrafast Nano-Optics research group at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, has now observed the earliest steps of this process in a complex dye molecule. As ...
Fat cells under false command
2025-08-20
Too much fat can be unhealthy: how fat cells, so-called adipocytes, develop, is crucial for the function of the fat tissue. That is why a team led by researchers from the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn investigated the influence of primary cilia dysfunction on adipocyte precursor cells in a mouse model. They found that overactivation of the Hedgehog signaling pathway causes abnormal development into connective tissue-like cells instead of white fat cells. Their findings have now been published in The EMBO Journal.
White adipose tissue stores energy and regulates important metabolic processes ...
How mutations in bodily tissues affect ageing
2025-08-20
Two new studies from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have investigated how mutations that occur in muscles and blood vessels over time can affect ageing. The studies, which are published in Nature Aging, show that such mutations can reduce muscle strength and accelerate blood vessel ageing. The results can be of significance to the treatment of age-related diseases.
Somatic mutations are non-hereditary genetic changes in cells and occur during a lifetime as a result of environmental factors or through random errors when a cell copies its DNA before dividing. The mutations can give rise to cancer, but otherwise their effect has been disputed.
“We’ve discovered that mutations ...
Industry managed forests more likely to fuel megafires
2025-08-20
The odds of high-severity wildfire were nearly one-and-a-half times higher on industrial private land than on publicly owned forests, a new study found. Forests managed by timber companies were more likely to exhibit the conditions that megafires love—dense stands of regularly spaced trees with continuous vegetation connecting the understory to the canopy.
The research, led by the University of Utah, University of California, Berkeley, and the United States Forest Service, is the first to identify how extreme weather conditions and forest management practices jointly impact fire severity.Leveraging ...
AI model developed by Dresden research team simultaneously detects multiple genetic colorectal cancer markers in tissue samples
2025-08-20
The multicenter study analyzed nearly 2,000 digitized tissue slides from colon cancer patients across seven independent cohorts in Europe and the US. The samples included both whole-slide images of tissue samples and clinical, demographic, and lifestyle data. The researchers developed a novel “multi-target transformer model” to predict a wide range of genetic alterations directly from routinely stained histological colon cancer tissue sections. Previous studies were typically limited to predicting single genetic alterations and did not account for co-occurring mutations ...