A report in the medical journal Neurology may help the children of Alzheimer’s patient’s breath a little easier. Until this point, genetics was considered the biggest factor influencing Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia causing illnesses. The new study, conducted by Australian researchers, showed that people with plaques in the brain have a greater risk for cognitive impairment than those with the gene tied to dementia-causing illness.
The study looked at 141 subjects, all of whom were the picture of health. They found that those that had amyloid beta plaques in the brain had a 20 percent greater decline in memory than those without.
“If you have high amyloid, whether you have the gene or not seems to not really affect that,” Yen Ying Lim, who led the study, said in an interview. “This could provide us with a platform to begin to investigate whether drugs designed to stop amyloid accumulation in the brain can actually prevent people from getting to the more severe stages of the disease.”
It will be some time before we see what scientists will do with the research findings, but it does give hope that the disease that affects 36 million, may have the ability to be prevented in the future.
