Signs of dementia in women? Understanding gender specifics

I’m sometimes asked about the difference between men and women when they’re affected by dementia. Of course, there are differences because dementia affects the way a person thinks and behaves and historically there has been a difference between the ways women and women have behaved and their gender roles.

Particularly with older people who might have lived all their lives with quite strong differences between what men and women were expected to do, when dementia strikes it will have a different effect. For example, if a man has dementia, it is difficult for him to learn any new things that he has to do on the domestic front if he loses his wife who used to do all the domestic tasks.

Rates of Alzheimers disease

“The rates of Alzheimers disease are greater in women than men after the age of 80.”

The rates of Alzheimers disease are greater in women than men after the age of 80.  Up till then the risk appears to be about the same. There are other dementia risks that up till now men faced more than women.  This included alcohol related brain damage, industrial accidents, being exposed to explosions in the military, and contact sports that caused head injury. As we know that education provides a protection against dementia in later life, we know that women in the past had fewer opportunities to go to university and pursue studies beyond school. There are some genetic markers more common in women that might also increase their risk, but a major issue is that not enough research is done on the difference between the sexes.  This is true of all diseases and conditions, not just dementia.

In our society until recently the burden of caring and domestic tasks almost always fell to women. This means that when a husband developed dementia his ageing wife was able to do a lot of the care that is necessary in the early stages which would delay the need for care home care, or even prevent it altogether. Unfortunately, many older men until now have not had the domestic skills that were required to provide home care for their wives when they started to be unable to look after themselves.

Gender differences

At the same time there is a gender difference between what seems acceptable for men and women to do. It is quite common for women to be expected to undertake intimate tasks like giving their husband a bath. It may be that this is more difficult for some older men, in terms of doing intimate care and washing of their wives. This sort of thing will change over time, but it is how things are now.

The majority of people who are providing care for a person with dementia, either professionally or informally, are women but there are of course lots of male carers and as men become older the likelihood of being a carer increases. Women still live longer than men on average and because age is one of the biggest risk factors for dementia this means that there are more women with dementia in our society. This is part of the explanation why care homes have more women in residence than men. If you add to that to what has just been said, that men may not have the social and domestic skills to take care of an older woman with dementia, this explains why the male population in care is smaller.

Early signs of dementia

The early signs of dementia vary, and it’s hard to say that there is much difference in how you spot the early signs in a man or a woman. It depends on who is looking, and how much they know about how the person usually is.  It depends also on how much stress the person is experiencing, and the other life challenges they are facing.  So the answer to the question about how it is different for men and women, particularly in the early stages, is that we don’t really see any patterns, and not enough research has been done to find out if there are any.