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The task facing Eli Lilly, the giant pharmaceutical company, sounds simple enough: Find 375 people with early Alzheimer’s disease for a bold new clinical trial aiming to slow or stop memory loss. There are 5.4 million Alzheimer’s patients in the United States. You’d think it would be easy to find that many participants for a trial like this one. But it’s not. And the problem has enormous implications for treatment of a disease that terrifies older Americans and has strained families in numbers too great to count. (Kolata, 7/23)

Women make up some 60% of Alzheimer’s disease patients in the United States, and over her lifetime, a woman is almost twice as likely than a man to develop the memory-robbing condition. New research offers tantalizing clues as to why that might be, suggesting that either hormonal influences or pregnancy-related changes in the immune system – or both -- may nudge a woman’s risk for dementia in one direction or the other. (Healy, 7/23)

Women are less likely to develop dementia later in life if they begin to menstruate earlier, go through menopause later, and have more than one child, researchers reported Monday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Chicago. And recent studies offer hints that hormone replacement therapy, which fell out of favor more than a decade ago, might offer a way to protect a woman's brain if it is given at the right time, the researchers said. The findings could help explain why women make up nearly two-thirds of people in the U.S. with Alzheimer's, says Maria Carrillo, the association's chief scientific officer. (Hamilton, 7/23)