Lisa Mosconi - The XX Brain: The Groundbreaking Science Empowering Women to Maximize Cognitive Health and Prevent Alzheimers Disease

I AM A DAUGHTER OF Alzheimers disease.

My father, Sargent Shriver, was diagnosed with Alzheimers in 2003. In 2011, he passed away from the disease. Hed been blessed with a particularly sharp mind, a beautifully tuned instrument that often left us awed and inspired. It was stunningly painful to watch this walking encyclopedia of a man go from knowing what seemed to be so much about so many things to being unable to recognize what a spoon or a fork was or remember my namelet alone being able to recall his own.

It was my father struggling with Alzheimers, and later my mother suffering from a stroke (a strong risk factor for dementia), that propelled me to make it my mission to help find a cure for this devastating illness.

For over fifteen years, I have been on the front lines of the fight against Alzheimers. As an activist and as a journalist, I work to raise awareness of this disease and to find ways to protect the precious future of Americas minds. Ive testified before Congress, founded the Womens Alzheimers Movement, produced the award-winning Alzheimers Project with HBO, written a bestselling childrens book on Alzheimers to start a conversation across generations, and executive-produced the Oscar-winning film Still Alice, the story of a woman beset with dementia.

In 2010, in collaboration with the Alzheimers Association, I published The Shriver Report: A Womans Nation Takes on Alzheimers, in which we reported publicly for the first time that two-thirds of all those who end up with Alzheimers are women. This startling fact prompted me to make women the top priority of my Alzheimers advocacy.

Think about it. Every sixty-five seconds another person develops Alzheimers disease; and of these newcomers, roughly two-thirds will be womenand we still dont know why. For a woman over sixty, the risk of developing Alzheimers is twice that of developing breast cancer. With risks this steep, why isnt anyone and everyone talking about this crisis?

It is also women who make up two-thirds of the 40 million unpaid American caregivers17 million of them attending to dementia patients alone. Perhaps not surprisingly, comparable figures are found the world over. These caregivers are women who simultaneously work inside or outside their homes (or both). While juggling a life that often includes caring for young children, women take on the arduous task of caring for loved ones suffering from dementia, too. The latter is an enormously strenuous job in and of itself. With their own health risks already at stake, how are these women expected to take adequate care of themselves while coping with the daily physical burden, stress, and grief to which they are exposedday in, day out, year after year?

Addressing these questions has been at the heart of my work at the Womens Alzheimers Movement, or WAM. One of the most critical missions at WAM is to educate women about their risk for developing this devastating diseaseand, perhaps even more important, to empower them with the information they need to take charge of their lives, health, and families by learning to care for their brain throughout their lives. We also fund women-based Alzheimers research and are now developing ways to put that research to practical use. Our goal is to help establish medical centers of excellence, designed for people, especially women, to find the doctors and expertise they need to learn how to delay or prevent Alzheimers disease. We know that there are distinct pathways to developing the disease in women that differ from those in men, and that there are specific junctures in a womans medical journey that may increase her risk for developing the disease. So why not learn as much as we can about a womans brain and its connection to her overall health so we can offer interventions, thereby delaying, if not preventing, the onset of Alzheimers?

The book you have before you, The XX Brain, does nothing less than lead the way.

Dr. Lisa Mosconi has devoted her entire career to studying this very issue. She, too, has a story impacted by Alzheimers. Lisas grandmother was one of four children; she had two younger sisters and a brother. All three sisters would die of Alzheimers while their brother was spared. As Lisas grandmother became too ill to function, Lisas mother took on the grueling role of primary caregiver and, along with it, the heartbreak, stress, and exhaustion that comes with shouldering such a task. Lisa witnessed firsthand how Alzheimers appeared to selectively target the women around her, while seeing the brunt of the caregiving also fall to the women of the household. The myriadfold impact this had on her life drove her to search for the answers youll find in this book.

Dedicating her lifes work to this mission, Lisa now offers a means by which women can protect themselves from dementia, whether that means caring for others or suffering from the disease ourselves.

As youre about to read in the pages ahead, the medical profession has long accepted a gender disparity when it comes to brain healthone that was explained away by the fact that women tend to live longer than men. But now we know that other things are going on as well.