Maria Shriver has opened up about a health concern that continues to affect millions, shedding light on a troubling difference between women and men. It's an issue that has become deeply personal for Shriver, one she has spent years working to bring into the spotlight. 

Shriver, ex-wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, has spent nearly two decades exploring why Alzheimer's affects women more than men. Her advocacy began after her father, Sargent Shriver, was diagnosed with the disease in 2003, leading her to found the Women's Alzheimer's Movement.

During her recent appearance on the Times 100 Health Leadership Forum, Maria Shriver was questioned about why women are unaware of getting Alzheimer's and how they develop it. 

"I think helping women understand what happens to them at midlife is a really whole other conversation to be held for women, and women don't really understand the symptoms of menopause," Shriver said during the interview. "They don't understand that menopause is an inflection point for Alzheimer's, and we are trying to do research on that."

She went on to point to ongoing research into how menopause itself may reshape the brain.

"It is a definitive thing: how does the brain change at menopause? We can now see that it does what we have to give to women. Are hormones really effective in preventing Alzheimer's or not? There's research going on."

The comments align with a growing body of research into the gender gap in Alzheimer's. Women make up roughly two-thirds of the nearly 6 million Americans living with the disease. 

Researchers have increasingly moved beyond the old assumption that this is simply because women live longer, looking instead at biological factors like menopause and hormones. 

As for Shriver, the mission goes beyond simply raising awareness. It's about pushing the research forward, so women can start making informed decisions about their brain health long before symptoms ever appear. 

Why is science only now catching up? 

Shriver's comments echo a broader shift happening in Alzheimer's research. For decades, the assumption was simple: women just live longer, so naturally more of them end up with the disease. But that explanation has increasingly fallen apart under scrutiny. 

Researchers are now zeroing in on biology itself, particularly the menopause transition, as a possible turning point. Neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi, who was the first to image the brains of women across the pre-, peri-, and post-menopausal stages, found that the brains of women further along in menopause already showed more signs of Alzheimer's than those of younger women and same-aged men. 

That work has led some researchers to describe Alzheimer's less as a disease of old age, and more as one rooted in midlife, even if symptoms take decades to appear. As Nature reported in an April feature this year, sex and gender differences in Alzheimer's have been largely neglected by science, leaving a body of research that experts say is still playing catch-up. 

Taken together, Shriver's advocacy and this emerging research point in the same direction: the disease's toll on women may have less to do with simply outliving men, and more to do with what happens inside the brain decades before diagnosis. 

Written by

Chionia Libania Colaco