MAPT and Alzheimer disease: The pattern of a female memory advantage in preclinical stages followed by faster decline in later stages has been suggested by prior cross-sectional studies showing a memory advantage in females among those with mild AD biomarker burden (i.e., Aβ, tau, hippocampal volume, brain glucose metabolism) that disappeared among individuals with moderate-to-severe pathological burden, suggestive of a steeper decline in females [8, 9, 11, 16, 18, 19] Studies by Caldwell et al. specifically examined the influence of sex at the preclinical AD stage.