Discussion

The goal of the observational study was to determine if a significant correlation exists between race or sex and the number of individuals diagnosed with LOAD. The importance of determining a potential correlation between LOAD and each of these respective variables lies in investigating the risk present in susceptible populations. It is worth noting that Alzheimer’s disproportionately affects developed nations, so the study focused on demographics within the U.S. (Chávez-Fumagalli, 2012). When a cohort of individuals diagnosed with the disease in the All of Us Database was analyzed, the sample size revealed that the number of individuals that identified as white was significantly higher than the number of individuals that failed to indicate race, followed by those that indicated black/African American, lastly followed by individuals that identified as more than one population/race. Based on this data, it was reasonable to conclude individuals that identified as white in the U.S. made up the largest percentage of Americans with the disease compared to other races. However, these findings do not provide conclusive data regarding the risk factor relative to different populations in the U.S. To avoid making an erroneous conclusion about the study that could harm susceptible demographics in clinical settings, future studies should investigate the proportion of affected patients within each race. A study conducted by the CDC found that African Americans have the highest prevalence of LOAD and related dementias (13.8 percent), followed by Hispanics who also have the highest projection for the disease (12.2 percent), and non-Hispanic whites (10.3 percent), American Indian and Alaska Natives (9.1 percent), and Asian and Pacific Islanders (8.4 percent) (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019). Analysis of the All of Us database supported the evidence that non-Hispanic whites have the largest total number of cases in the U.S. due to the relative size of the population, but whites do not have as high of a risk of developing LOAD as African American individuals or Hispanics. In regards to the investigation exploring the connection between Alzheimer’s disease and sex at birth, analysis of the All of Us database subject to individuals with available sex information and a diagnosis of the condition did not reveal a significant correlation between the variables of interest. Instead, the number of individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer’s between the ages of 45 and 65 was slightly higher in female participants than males, while the number of diagnosed individuals above the age of 65 was slightly higher in males than females. When compared to other reports, A 2018 study of 16,926 Swedish women and men ages 65 and older found that incident rates of Alzheimer’s disease were greater in women than men, with disease rates specifically diverging after the age of 80 (Beam et. al., 2018). Similarly, a study of men in women in Taiwan found that Alzheimer’s disease had a greater chance of developing in women over the course of a 7 year period (Liu et. al., 2019). It is important to note that the incidence of non-Alzheimer’s dementia is not greater for women and the increased progression of Alzheimer’s in women may be attributed to the fact that women tend to live longer than men with an increased lifespan to develop the disease (Ginter et. al., 2013). The absence of a significant correlation between sex assigned at birth and Alzheimer’s disease found in the All of Us database may be attributed to the evidence that women have higher average lifespans than men. Furthermore, the sample size analyzed may not lead to conclusive evidence due to the introduction of chance, an error that may harm susceptible populations in clinical settings through misdiagnosis. All in all, analysis of sex at birth and the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease does not support the hypothesis that female individuals are at a higher risk for developing the disease than males. However, the observational study aligns with studies that factor in the variable of longer average lifespan, suggesting that there may be less correlation between sex at birth and development of the disease than statistics suggest.