A scientific team from Massachusetts General Hospital (Charlestown, EU) has found that certain genetic factors in Alzheimer neurodegenerative disease can be detected in young adults. The results of the work have been published in the journal American Academy of Neurology.
“The phase that have not yet appeared symptoms can last for more than a decade,” says Elizabeth C.Mormino, a researcher at the center and one of the authors. “The new clinical trials as soon as possible try to stop the damage memory and thinking caused by the disease. It is therefore essential to understand the influence of risk factors, “he adds.
For the study, researchers calculated a polygenic risk score based on whether a person had certain high-risk genetic variants in 166 people with dementia.
Participants had a mean age of 75 years. They also sought specific markers of Alzheimer’s disease, including memory and thinking in decline, clinical progression of the disease and hippocampal volume (the memory center of the brain).
In addition, the authors examined the links between the risk index and hippocampal volume in thousand 322 healthy participants aged between 18 and 35 years.
clinical progression
The research found that among older people without dementia, a higher score of polygenic risk was associated with poorer memory and a smaller at baseline hippocampus, representing 2.3 percent of the total variation in memory and two percent of the variation in volume of the hippocampus.
During the three years of the study, a high score was associated with a greater longitudinal decline of memory, impaired executive function and clinical progression of the disease.
Finally, the greatest risk score was associated with the overall progression of the disease. Here, 15 of the 194 participants were cognitively normal at baseline suffered mild cognitive impairment own onset of the ailment.
In addition, 143 of 332 participants with mild cognitive impairment at the beginning of the investigation developed Alzheimer’s disease after three years. Each increase in the standard deviation in the polygenic risk associated with a 1.6-fold increase in the risk of clinical progression.
Within the younger group, a higher rate risk was linked to smaller hippocampal volume. For this group, the risk score accounted for 0.2 percent of the difference in hippocampal volume among those with scores of high and low risk.
Mornino said that a larger study is needed to confirm the findings. “The goal of this research is to help doctors identify people at high risk of dementia for future preventive treatments can be used as soon as possible.”
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health in the US.