Dementia Tests May Miss Women for Years Longer Than Men, Study Suggests

A new study has raised concerns that some of the tests used to detect Alzheimer’s disease may be missing early cognitive decline in women for years. Researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University found that women with Alzheimer’s-related brain changes maintained normal verbal memory for around 2.7 years longer than men at a similar disease stage. Once that advantage disappeared, women’s verbal memory declined around 25% to 50% faster.

“This masked period represents a window for earlier detection and timely intervention before irreversible neurodegeneration,” the authors wrote.

The charity added that this means we still have a “poor understanding of how diseases causing dementia might work differently in females.”

HuffPost UK

When Dementia Tests Are Built Around the Wrong Baseline

The healthcare system has a familiar pattern: it often tells women that serious symptoms are anxiety, depression, menopause, weight-related or simply stress. So findings like these feel frustrating rather than surprising. But this research points to something deeper than individual doctors dismissing women. The diagnostic tools themselves may not work equally well for us.

If women maintain stronger verbal memory for longer, then a test built heavily around verbal recall may make cognitive decline look less advanced than it actually is. That means bias can exist before a woman even enters the consultation room. If the benchmark does not properly account for differences between men and women, even someone administering the test correctly could miss the warning signs.

This is exactly why studying women properly matters. Medicine cannot keep treating male bodies and male patterns of disease as the default and then acting surprised when women are diagnosed later or present differently.

The study is still a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed, so its findings need to be treated cautiously. But the question it raises deserves attention, particularly when women already make up the majority of people living with dementia.

Delayed diagnosis has real consequences. Patients miss opportunities for treatment. Families have less time to prepare for future care. Loved ones spend years knowing something is wrong while doctors tell them the tests say otherwise. That is not a minor flaw in the system.