Degree Type

Open Access Capstone

Publication Date

11-16-2025

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a growing public health crisis that disproportionately affects Maine women (Alzheimer’s Association, 2024). In addition to being both more likely to develop AD and more likely be diagnosed with AD later than men, Maine women face barriers in access to care and specialists (Alzheimer’s Association, 2024; Lu et al., 2023; Rao et al., 2017). The objective of this review was to explore the available literature on sex-specific adjustments to cognitive assessment tools that can improve the detection of AD in women and examine whether these findings can be applied to Maine women in primary care. A search was conducted for recent studies with inclusion criteria of incidence of AD or cognitive impairment as an outcome and sex-specific adjustments or comparisons within their study design. Studies were excluded if they included biomarker testing. Results revealed three studies for review, all of which used sex-specific adjustments for different combinations of existing cognitive assessment tools and all of which found statistically significant differences in the incidence of cognitive impairment between men and women when using sex-specific adjustments compared to traditional scoring (Engedal et al., 2021; Luo et al., 2022; Sundermann et al., 2021). Though more research is needed, it seems feasible that these sex-specific adjustments to cognitive assessment tools could be applied to Maine women in primary care settings to improve the detection of AD based on Maine’s high population of older adults and multiple potentially interested stakeholders (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020a). Therefore, in addition to conducting more sex-specific AD detection research, efforts should be made to promote the use of the sex-specific AD detection tools in Maine primary care and increase funding for said research.

Community Engaged/Serving

Part of the UMass Boston Community-Engaged Teaching, Research, and Service Series. //scholarworks.umb.edu/engage

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