Early diagnosis with AI for women with Alzheimer's

A breakthrough, also for gender-based medicine. Artificial intelligence can be that boost needed toreduce disparities in health and care based on gender and beyond. Disparities that weigh on women's health and can decide their life and death, and that result in delayed or incorrect diagnoses, unstudied side effects or women's own characteristics (such as hormonal phases) that are not taken into adequate consideration. Added to all this are those gender-related stereotypes that in health and care can become decisive and where AI-related innovations can make a difference, for example with the recognition of early or specific signs of certain diseases, which differ according to gender. With the focus on AI learning models, which must not replicate stereotypes and prejudices.

Moreover, the fact that there is a gender issue to be considered in medicine is now beyond doubt, as also emerged at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where a report produced with the McKinsey Health Institute entitled 'Closing the women's health gap: a $1 trillion opportunity to improve lives and economies' was presented, an analysis of the average health status of women globally, and an assessment of the potential that could be released from a health and economic perspective by investing in their improvement. The report also analyses the main underlying causes of the gender gap in health, which relate to scientific research, data availability, investment decisions and levels of care. The study shows that only 1% of medical research is dedicated to gender-specific conditions and that women, despite living longer on average than men, spend 25% of their lives in poor health. Closing this gap would benefit 3.9 billion women, with seven extra days of life each year, an average of 500 days in a lifetime, and would lead to an economic benefit estimated at $1 trillion between now and 2040. What is needed, however, is a three-pronged approach: that of care, that of research, and that of investment. Together with a new awareness of the importance of precision medicine.

It is on these lines that work needs to be done, explains Antonella Santuccione Chadha, a neuroscientist and medical expert in precision gender medicine and ceo of the non-profit organisation Women's Brain Project, in Italy to attend the Milan Longevity Summit from 14 to 27 March. "Women represent a huge pool of under-diagnosed patients," says the neuroscientist, who highlights two elements: firstly, the lack of specific research dedicated to women and their peculiar physical and other characteristics. 'We need to get away from the idea of one-size-fits-all medicine and move towards precision medicine,' he says. 'The medicine we know today has been developed predominantly for males, and if you look at the genomics data, they are mostly 80 kilos in weight, young and healthy. But I don't have similar patients in the ward. Research to be valid has to include as much diversity as possible, from ethnicity to gender, age and so on'.

Think, for example, of the hormonal changes to which women's bodies are subjected in three key phases of life, menstruation, pregnancy and menopause: "There is a lack of studies on the impact of drugs at these different times, for example, we are only now beginning to study the relationship between neurodegenerative and immune system diseases and menopause, and we also see that women suffer more than men from the side effects of drugs because these are neither adequately studied nor reported. This is a serious problem, also in terms of costs such as hospitalisation due to these effects,' stresses Santuccione Chadha.

But upstream there is another element that precisely with AI can have a breakthrough: 'The delay in diagnosis is linked to the biases we all have to deal with. Alzheimer's diagnoses of women are made later than those of men, for multiple sclerosis women are diagnosed 2-3 years after the onset of the first symptoms, earlier they are treated for depression, for stress. Even today in medical practice too often women are not believed, we are still in the days of hysteria'.