Congratulations toSarah Buckley, who completed her master's thesis in our lab!!!
Her work asked an important question. We know that women are affected by Alzheimer's disease more than men, but we still do not fully understand why. Sarah looked at one part of this puzzle, the idea of brain resilience, which is the brain's ability to keep working even when disease is present.
🧩 Alzheimer's is very hard to understand because it is rarely about one single gene going wrong. Using human datasets from the hippocampus, she looked at how genes behave in women and men with the disease. Then studied how those genes work together, not one by one, but as a group.
💡 This is where it gets interesting. Sarah found that the disease does not look the same in women and men at the molecular level. In the female brain, the defences were organised into connected systems working together, across neuronal flexibility, energy and fat balance, blood supply to the brain, and cell structure. In the male brain, that same level of organisation did not appear in the same way. This may reflect a resilient response in some women, and while it does not yet tell us why women are more affected, it shows that any answer will need to take sex differences seriously.
👏 Congratulations, Sarah. This is really good work, and I look forward to seeing what you do next.
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