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• Posted June 30, 2026

Women With Parkinson's More Likely To Have Brain Changes Related To Alzheimer's

Women with Parkinson’s disease might be more vulnerable than men to Alzheimer’s-related changes in their brains, new research suggests.

Women with Parkinson’s have higher levels of amyloid beta plaques in their brains, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, researchers reported Sunday in Geneva at a meeting of the European Academy of Neurology.

“These findings suggest that women may be more susceptible to amyloid-driven pathology in the context of Parkinson's disease, echoing patterns observed in clinically diagnosed and pathologically confirmed Alzheimer's disease subjects,” lead researcher Dr. Erika Driver-Dunckley, a neurologist with the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, said in a news release.

Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s frequently co-occur in seniors, but it’s been unclear whether there are any sex-related differences in how the two diseases affect people’s brains.

To examine these possible differences, researchers analyzed data from 230 people whose autopsies confirmed that they had Parkinson’s disease.

Results showed that women were more than twice as likely to have high levels of amyloid plaques in their brains than men, even after adjusting for factors like age and genetics.

Overall, more than half of women (57%) had a high plaque burden compared to men (40%).

Despite this higher level of amyloid plaques, however, there were no significant differences between men and women in rates of Alzheimer’s dementia or performance on brain tests.

“Men and women with Parkinson's disease had similar rates of Alzheimer's dementia and similar results on cognitive testing,” Driver-Dunckley said. “However, women showed a higher amyloid plaque burden compared with men."

Previous studies have linked these sorts of brain changes to greater impairment in women with Alzheimer’s but not Parkinson’s disease, suggesting that there’s more to learn, researchers said.

"The greater severity of amyloid plaque pathology in women should have an effect on the onset and severity of cognitive impairment, but our study did not find this," Driver-Dunckley said.

"It may be that a larger study would pick up cognitive differences related to the increased plaque load,” she added. “Our findings highlight the need for further research into sex differences in Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's-related pathology. An important next step will be to confirm these findings in additional large clinicopathological studies and better understand the biological mechanisms that may underlie these differences."

Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The American Brain Foundation has more on connections between Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

SOURCE: European Academy of Neurology, news release, June 28, 2026