Alzheimer’s Odds Skew Against Women

Brain MRI scans with highlighted section and text overlay — Photo: DedMityay / Shutterstock

Most women have no idea their own brain carries a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease than a man’s does.

Story Snapshot

A recent survey found only one in five women know they face higher Alzheimer’s risk than men
Maria Shriver delivered the message at the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum in New York on September 11, 2026
Shriver founded the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement after her father’s 2003 Alzheimer’s diagnosis
Nearly two-thirds of Alzheimer’s patients in the United States are women
She wants women building brain-healthy habits decades before symptoms ever show up

A Stark Statistic Nobody Talks About

Maria Shriver stood before a room of health leaders in New York and delivered a number that should stop every woman in her tracks. Only one in five women realize they are more likely than men to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Shriver told the crowd women need to start thinking about their brains decades before any symptom ever appears, not after a diagnosis lands.

She framed prevention as something concrete, not vague wellness talk. Exercise, sleep, diet, social connection, and mental engagement are the daily habits she says can change the trajectory of a disease that still has no cure. It is a message built for women in their 40s and 50s, long before retirement age, when most people start worrying about memory loss.

Why Shriver Made This Personal

Shriver has pushed this cause for more than two decades, ever since her father, Sargent Shriver, the former United States Ambassador to France, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2003. Watching him decline pushed her from journalist to advocate, and she has spent years building an organization aimed squarely at closing the gap between what science knows and what women are told.

That organization, the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement, now operates through Cleveland Clinic, where Shriver also co-founded the Comprehensive Women’s Health and Research Center. She has said nearly two out of every three brains affected by Alzheimer’s belong to women, and for a long time, doctors simply assumed that gap came down to women living longer, not biology. She told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that assumption has since been debunked.

The Science Backing Her Call

Shriver’s advocacy did not appear out of thin air. Peer-reviewed research has documented sex differences in Alzheimer’s disease for years, covering how the disease shows up, how fast it progresses, and how it responds to treatment. One widely cited estimate puts a 65-year-old woman’s lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s at 21.2 percent, compared to 11.6 percent for men of the same age. By age 45, women already face roughly a one in five lifetime risk.

Only one in five women know that they’re more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than men, according to a recent survey. Maria Shriver wants that number to climb—and for women to start thinking about their brains decades before symptoms show up https://t.co/IxIlf9KVjo

— TIME (@TIME) September 11, 2026

Researchers still disagree on exactly why the gap exists. Some point to hormonal shifts tied to menopause, others to genetic risk factors like APOE-e4 that appear to hit women harder, and others to how brain inflammation differs by sex. What researchers do agree on is that the difference is real and measurable, not simply a byproduct of women outliving men. Shriver’s push for earlier prevention habits and more research dollars lines up with where the science already points, even as the exact mechanisms get sorted out in labs. For women weighing whether to take her advice seriously, that is a reassuring place to start: the biology backing her warning is not speculation, it is documented, published, and growing every year.