08 July 2026
FENS News, Neuroscience News
Barcelona, Spain: New research presented today (Wednesday) at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2026 [1] has discovered some of the genetic changes in brain cells that may help to explain why more men than women develop Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a condition in which parts of the brain become progressively damaged over many years. It affects approximately 9.4 million people worldwide and it is becoming increasingly prevalent, especially as populations age. Around 90% of cases are thought to be caused by a combination of genetic variations and environmental and lifestyle factors. PD is 1.5- to 2-fold more common in men than women, but the reasons for this difference are not clear. Men also experience a faster decline in their thinking abilities and faster progression of difficulties with everyday living.
Dr Julia Schulze-Hentrich, a professor in the Genetics and Epigenetics Department and affiliated with the Center for Gender-Specific Biology and Medicine (CGMB) at Saarland University, Germany, told the FENS Forum: “The higher prevalence of Parkinson’s disease in men suggests that sex-dependent biology may influence vulnerability. Therefore, studying sex differences may help identifying disease mechanisms that would be hidden in analyses that pool men and women together.”
In earlier work [2], Professor Schulze-Hentrich and colleagues had studied blood samples from agricultural workers, including 71 people with early PD and 147 healthy controls. They found that women with PD had changes to DNA methylation in 69 regions of the genome, compared to only two in men. DNA methylation doesn’t change genes, but works like a dimmer switch to turn the activity of genes up or down.
“These findings suggested that a person’s genetic make-up influences these DNA methylation changes, and that interaction with environmental exposures, such as to pesticides, may also contribute to the development of Parkinson’s disease,” she said.
In her new research presented today, Prof. Schulze-Hentrich set out to understand the mechanisms that might be playing a role in the different DNA methylation patterns she had seen in men and women and their associations with PD. The researchers looked at post-mortem brain samples from 73 people with PD (28 women and 45 men) and compared them with samples from a control group of 24 people without PD (9 women and 15 men).
“We looked at differences in gene expression individually in all cells of the brain – neurons, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and microglia – in healthy brains and in PD brains in men and women. We studied five brain regions and found that PD causes common changes in the brain, regardless of sex. All these cells in the five regions, showed signs of being under stress. They switched on proteins that help damaged proteins fold correctly, called ‘chaperones’. However, we also found important differences between men and women in gene activity in some cells and some brain regions,” she said.
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