Parental link found in Alzheimer's disease

BEIJING, Feb. 22 (Xinhuanet) -- Parental link

of Alzheimer's disease has been found by a study released by

researchers at Boston University School of Medicine, according to media reports.

The study showed that participants of a

group who carried a gene strongly linked to Alzheimer's had worse performance in

memory tests than the other group who had the same gene but did not have a

parent with Alzheimer's disease.

There are 715 people,averaged 59 years

old, taking part in the ongoing Framingham Heart Study,including 282

whose parents, one or both, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's or other

dementia. When given a battery of cognitive tests, those who logged the lowest

scores on verbal and visual memory tasks were people who were carriers of the

ApoE4 gene and had parents with dementia. The difference in memory between the

two groups was equivalent to approximately 15 years of brain aging, researchers

found.

"How big an effect we saw was surprising," said Dr.

Sudha Seshadri, a BU associate professor of neurology and senior author of the

study. "It was like you were comparing two groups, 55-year-olds to

70-year-olds."

The study, which was funded by the U.S. National

Institutes of Health and released Wednesday, is to be presented at the American

Academy of Neurology's annual meeting, from April 25 to May 2, in Seattle.

(Agencies)