A new medical study of Alzheimer’s disease stresses the importance of family history when it comes to evaluating your disease risk.
If you have a parent who’s had Alzheimer’s, think back to when they first started to show symptoms of the disease, such as confusion, memory loss or difficulty performing familiar tasks.
That year is important — because the closer you are to it, the likelier you are to show degenerative signs of Alzheimer’s yourself, according to scientists at McGill University in Montreal.
The researchers found that amyloid plaques — the protein fragments which cause the cognitive decline associated with the disease — become more prevalent in the brain when you approach the same age that your mother and father were when they initially became symptomatic.
In fact, closeness to your parent’s age when they first experienced the onset of Alzheimer’s is a more important risk factor than your age itself.
In other words, “A 60-year-old whose mother developed Alzheimer’s at age 63 would be more likely to have amyloid plaques in their brain than a 70-year-old whose mother developed the disease at age 85,” said researcher Sylvia Villenueve in a press release.
The study, which involved 101 subjects, also found that the genetic impact of Alzheimer’s disease is more evident in women.
“We noticed that this link between parental age and amyloid deposits is stronger in women than in men,” added Villenueve.
Though there is no known cure for Alzheimer’s disease, researchers believe that early detection and lifestyle intervention can help slow the disease’s progression.