They call you "old man" 'cause you cannot even remember where you left your keys or what you ate in the morning. The others may be right. The leading cause of senile dementia is Alzheimer's disease. A new research published in "2008 Alzheimer's Disease: Facts and Figures," and carried out by a team from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), has found that 16% of the women are at risk for developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) in their lifetime, while in the case of the men, that risk is only 10%.

Stroke and dementia are the most dishabilitating age-related neurological conditions and the only neurological issues encountered in the 10 top causes of disease burden. The team made the research on a poll of 2,794 subjects of the Framingham Heart Study for 29 years, who were without dementia.

At the end of the period, there were overall 400 cases of dementia, of which 292 cases were of Alzheimer's Disease. The team discovered that the lifetime risk for developing any dementia was over 20% for women, and 13% for men.

"The realization that the lifetime risk of stroke or dementia was more than one in three in both sexes, which is higher than the lifetime risk of coronary heart disease in women, is sobering," said lead author Dr. Sudha Seshadri, an associate professor of neurology at BUSM and an investigator of the Framingham Heart Study.

The investigators believe that these differences in the dementia risk could be caused by the higher lifetime expectancy for women, correlated also with the risk for several other diseases.

"People should be aware of the risk of a disease at some point in their life. Similarly, such statistics are essential for public health planners to estimate the projected disease burden in a population during its expected lifespan," added Seshadri.