A clue to a cure for Alzheimer ’s disease

Are you worried about Alzheimer’s disease? Does one of your parents or siblings have the disease? If so, your risks are between two and four times that of the general public. What about people without a family history of the disease? Unfortunately, everyone is at risk for it. By age 85, half of you reading this article today will have developed Alzheimer’s disease, with or without a family history. Sounds pretty scary, doesn’t it? I’m writing today to give you some good news. A new study from the lab of Harvard researcher Yakeel Quiroz, PhD, has suggested a new target for drugs that might have the potential to slow down or even stop Alzheimer’s disease in its tracks. A family with early-onset disease — and one exception Dr. Quiroz, her longtime colleague Dr. Francisco Lopera, and first author Dr. Joseph Arboleda-Velasquez have been studying a large family in Colombia, South America, some of whom have a mutation in the presenilin 1 gene that causes early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Over 1,000 people in this family are affected by the mutation. Among these family members, early symptoms of Alzheimer’s, such as memory loss and word-finding difficulties, almost always develop around age 44, and dementia follows at around age 49. Sometimes individuals may develop these symptoms or dementia one, two, or even three years later. But not 10 or 20 years later — and certainly not 30 years later. Yet one individual — a woman in her 70s with this genetic mutation — is...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Alzheimer's Disease Genes Health Healthy Aging Memory Source Type: blogs