Whitney Wharton
Emory University, GA·Neuroscience
Two-thirds of people with Alzheimer's disease are women, and longer life expectancy does not fully explain the gap. One possibility is that shifting sex hormone levels across a woman's life, especially around midlife, change the brain in ways that raise risk.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
sex hormones
estradiol
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether sex hormones measured in both blood and cerebrospinal fluid, estradiol, estrone, progesterone and testosterone, differentially influence Alzheimer's risk factors including inflammatory markers, sleep and cerebral blood flow in middle-aged women.
- Determine whether sex hormone levels moderate the relationship between inflammation, sleep disruption and reduced brain blood flow and established Alzheimer's biomarkers, including cognitive performance, spinal fluid amyloid and tau, and MRI measures.
- Compare these hormone-biomarker relationships between 75 African American and 75 Caucasian midlife women at elevated risk through parental history of Alzheimer's disease or the APOE e4 allele.
- Collect two years of prospective data, including annual cognitive testing and blood draws plus baseline and year-two lumbar puncture, neuroimaging and overnight objective sleep monitoring, to extend existing longitudinal cohorts of at-risk midlife women.
More about the research
Hormones may act directly on the proteins that define Alzheimer's pathology, amyloid-beta and tau, and indirectly through inflammation, disrupted sleep, and changes in blood flow and volume in the brain, each of which is an independent risk factor on its own. Risk is also higher for African American adults than for white adults, so mechanisms need to be examined in both groups rather than assumed to be the same.
Why it matters
Understanding why women, and African American adults, carry higher Alzheimer's risk is a prerequisite for prevention efforts that work for those groups. By linking midlife hormone levels to inflammation, sleep, brain blood flow and spinal fluid markers of amyloid and tau, this work could identify modifiable midlife pathways and help determine for whom hormone-related interventions might plausibly be tested, as well as inform the design of larger prevention studies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Julie Saugstad
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Neuroscience
Characterize the size and surface marker proteins of cerebrospinal fluid extracellular vesicles from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and control participants, comparing females vs. males and APOE-e4 vs. APOE-e3 carriers.
Barbara Snider
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether 6 months of suvorexant, a sleep drug that blocks wake-promoting orexin signals, lowers the ratio of phosphorylated to unmodified tau-181 in spinal fluid of cognitively normal, amyloid-positive older adults with insomnia, compared with placebo.
Yunjie Tong
Purdue University, IN·Neuroscience
Measure how strongly changes in cerebral blood volume, the amount of blood in the brain, are coupled to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) movement during both wake and sleep states.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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