Sex Differences in the Alzheimer's Brain Age Gap: APOE ε4 Plays a Major Role
INTRODUCTION: Brain age gap (BAG) is the difference between a person's chronological age and the age predicted from the structural appearance of their brain on MRI. A higher BAG indicates an older-appearing brain and provides a global marker of structural brain aging across the Alzheimer's disease continuum. Prior studies suggest that females may show greater Alzheimer's disease-related pathology or faster late-stage neurodegeneration than males. We tested whether sex was associated with baseline BAG or longitudinal BAG change after accounting for APOE {epsilon}4 genetic risk, amyloid positivity, cognitive severity, and disease stage. METHODS: We developed a domain-adaptive deep learning model to estimate BAG from T1-weighted MRIs, training it on 26,512 neurologically healthy UK Biobank data and fine-tuning it on 2,974 amyloid-negative cognitively normal samples from Mayo Clinic Study of Aging and OASIS-3 cohorts. We applied the model to ADNI and used hierarchical mixed-effects models to test whether sex was associated with BAG trajectories after adjusting for Alzheimer's disease risk factors. RESULTS: After adjustment for Alzheimer's disease risk factors, there was no baseline sex differences in BAG. Longitudinally, females showed greater BAG acceleration than males, but this effect was moderated by APOE {epsilon}4 status. APOE {epsilon}4 accelerated brain aging in a dose-dependent manner, independent of amyloid burden. DISCUSSION: Sex differences in BAG across the AD continuum were largely explained by APOE {epsilon}4-related acceleration rather than by an independent effect of sex alone. These findings suggest that females may be more vulnerable to APOE {epsilon}4-associated structural brain aging over time.