A person’s chance of developing dementia is influenced by family history, variations in certain genes, and medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
A person’s chance of developing dementia is influenced by family history, variations in certain genes, and medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. But less is known about the factors that affect when the first symptoms of forgetfulness and confusion will arise.
A new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reveals that people with dementia – whose parents also had dementia – develop symptoms an average of six years earlier than their parents. Factors such as education, blood pressure and carrying the genetic variant APOE4, which increases the risk of dementia, accounted for less than a third of the variation in the age at onset – meaning that more than two-thirds remains to be explained.
“It’s important to know who is going to get dementia, but it’s also important to know when symptoms will develop,” said first author Gregory Day, MD, an assistant professor of neurology and an investigator at the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC). “If we can better understand the factors that delay or accelerate the age at onset, we eventually could get to the point where we collect this information at a doctor’s visit, put it through our calculator, and determine an expected age at onset for any adult child of a person with dementia.”
The study is available online in JAMA Network Open.
Read more at Washington University School of Medicine
Photo Credit: geralt via Pixabay
