# Sex in Alzheimer disease

> **NIH NIH R03** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO · 2020 · $161,000

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
With the aging of the US population and high costs associated with caring for the cognitively impaired elderly,
identifying older individuals at greatest risk for developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) is of utmost societal and
clinical importance. Currently no treatments effectively slow the progression of AD or other causes of cognitive
decline, but billions of dollars are being invested to develop effective treatments. Development of inexpensive,
genomic methods that go beyond APOE to identify individuals at risk for cognitive decline has the potential to
greatly accelerate the development of new treatments. The overall significance of this project is that it will use
a validated polygenic score to more comprehensively understand when older men and women are at highest
risk for cognitive decline and Alzheimer's neurodegeneration. Using an age-dependent approach, we have
recently developed and validated a novel `polygenic hazard score' (PHS) for quantifying AD dementia age of
onset, even among APOE E3/3 individuals, who constitute the majority of all US individuals with AD dementia.
In this proposal, our objective is to comprehensively assess whether sex differences influence how PHS
predicts cognitive decline and AD neurodegeneration and how age influences this relationship. Leveraging
genotypic and multi-modal phenotypic data from several existing NIH-funded cohorts (total n > 7,000), we will
investigate whether age-dependent sex differences modify cognitive decline, postmortem and in vivo AD
neuropathology and medial temporal lobe volume loss.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9896747
- **Project number:** 5R03AG063260-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO
- **Principal Investigator:** Jennifer S Yokoyama
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $161,000
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-04-01 → 2020-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9896747

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9896747, Sex in Alzheimer disease (5R03AG063260-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9896747. Licensed CC0.

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