Sexual Dimorphism in Healthy Aging and Mild Cognitive Impairment: A DTI Study

Previous PET and MRI studies have indicated that the degree to which pathology translates into clinical symptoms is strongly dependent on sex with women more likely to express pathology as a diagnosis of AD, whereas men are more resistant to clinical symptoms in the face of the same degree of pathology. Here we use DTI to investigate the difference between male and female white matter tracts in healthy older participants (24 women, 16 men) and participants with mild cognitive impairment (21 women, 12 men). Differences between control and MCI participants were found in fractional anisotropy (FA), radial diffusion (DR), axial diffusion (DA) and mean diffusion (MD). A significant main effect of sex was also reported for FA, MD and DR indices, with male control and male MCI participants having significantly more microstructural damage than their female counterparts. There was no sex by diagnosis interaction. Male MCIs also had significantly less normalised grey matter (GM) volume than female MCIs. However, in terms of absolute brain volume, male controls had significantly more brain volume than female controls. Normalised GM and WM volumes were found to decrease significantly with age with no age by sex interaction. Overall, these data suggest that the same degree of cognitive impairment is associated with greater structural damage in men compared with women

Prothrombotic coagulation defects and cardiovascular risk factors in young women with acute myocardial infarction

We investigated the effect of prothrombotic coagulation defects in combination with smoking and other conventional risk factors on the risk of myocardial infarction in young women. In 217 women with a first myocardial infarction before the age of 50 years and 763 healthy control women from a population-based case-control study, factor V Leiden and prothrombin 20210A status were determined. Data on major cardiovascular risk factors and oral contraceptive use were combined with the presence or absence of these prothrombotic mutations, and compared between patients and controls. The overall odds ratio for myocardial infarction in the presence of a coagulation defect was 1.1 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.6-1.9]. The combination of a prothrombotic mutation and current smoking increased the risk of myocardial infarction 12-fold (95% CI 5.7-27) compared with non-smokers without a coagulation defect. Among women who smoked cigarettes, factor V Leiden presence versus absence increased the risk of myocardial infarction by 2.0 (95% CI 0.9-4.6), and prothrombin 20210A presence versus absence had an odds ratio of 1.0 (95% CI 0.3-3.5). We conclude that factor V Leiden and prothrombin 20210A do not add substantially to the overall risk of myocardial infarction in young women. However, in women who smoke, the presence of factor V Leiden increased the risk of myocardial infarction twofold

CORRIGENDUM: The expanding clinical phenotype of Bosch-Boonstra-Schaaf optic atrophy syndrome: 20 new cases and possible genotype-phenotype correlations.

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/gim.2016.18