APOE and COVID-19: Both AD and long-COVID are more prevalent among women (Fang et al., 2024;Ferretti et al., 2018;Sylvester et al., 2022), whereas men experience more severe acute COVID-19 and higher mortality (Gomez et al., 2021).APOE4, the strongest genetic risk factor for sporadic AD, is associated with BBB breakdown (Montagne et al., 2020) as well as COVID-19 severity and mortality (Kuo et al., 2020;Safdari Lord et al., 2022).