How pregnancy and childbirth may protect some women from developing dementia
Women make up some 60 percent 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.
In a comprehensive study that tracked almost 15,000 U.S. women from middle age into their senior years, researchers found that women who gave birth to three or more children were less likely than those who had a single child to develop dementia.
Reporting their findings Monday, the authors of the new research said also that women whose lifetime span of
