Sex‐specific accelerated decay in time/activity‐dependent plasticity and associative memory in an animal model of Alzheimer's disease

In a series of slice electrophysiology experiments, we demonstrated that female APPSwe-Psen1dE9 Alzheimer's disease model mice show greater impairments in hippocampal synaptic plasticity than male mice of the same age and genotype. Female APP/PS1 mice also showed greater impairments in behavioural associative memory, higher amyloid plaque burden and increased microglial activation in the hippocampus than males at age 4-5 months. We thus profiled hippocampal mRNA from these mice to investigate the underlying molecular mechanisms. Compared to wild-type mice of the same sex, we found that female APP/PS1 mice showed a greater upregulation of microglial and inflammatory genes than males. Moreover, downregulation of genes associated with memory and plasticity was observed uniquely in female APP/PS1 mice. These data provide insight into the potential mechanisms of the greater prevalence and faster progression of AD in females. Sex differences in the hippocampal transcriptome of APPSwe-Psen1dE9 Alzheimer's disease model mice