Is whether you get Alzheimers genetically predetermined at birth, or do environmental factors cause this degenerative disease?
New Genetic Risk Factor For Alzheimer’s Discovered: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have singled out a new genetic risk factor for the debilitating brain disease that affects 4 million Americans today and will strike as many as 14 million during the next 50 years. In a decade-long research study following more than 300 first-degree relatives of 189 Alzheimer’s patients, the researchers identified a small area of chromosome 10 that, when combined with the previously identified APOE E4 gene, significantly increase a person’s risk of developing the disease. This combination of genes produced a 16-fold increase in the risk of AD among first-degree relatives. By comparison, this effect is greater than the increased risk of lung cancer caused by smoking. These new results are supported by independent studies of AD patients and controls from Pittsburgh, Boston, and Bonn, Germany. Dr. Zubenko and his colleagues studied normal individuals between the ages of
