Will You Suffer From Alzheimer's? You Might Find Out At 50

Research presented at an international Alzheimer's conference may give doctors the tools to predict whether a seemingly healthy middle aged patient will develop dementia -- even twenty years before it occurs.

According to Newsday, some of the findings presented at the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders in Madrid are:

Tiia Ngandu and colleagues from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have compiled a list of risk factors that could help predict a middle-aged person's risk for future dementia. The factors include old age, little education, high systolic blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity and inactivity - many of the same factors that predict heart disease.

... In another study presented at the meeting, California researchers analyzing information from the well-known Framingham Heart Study found that stroke, especially in men, could shrink the brain and increase the risk for dementia.

Other researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle found also that poor lung function in older adults also seems to be associated with problems thinking and remembering.

Other research presented at the conference supports a diabetes-Alzheimer's correlation, and suggests that the class of drugs used to treat type 2 diabetes -- thiazolidinediones -- may reduce the brain cell inflammation believed by some researchers to be implicated in dementia.

More puzzling, other research found that gradual (unplanned) weight loss in women may precede dementia by a number of years. Scientists believe this is likely correlation, not causation: the subjects "might have less initiative and lose interest in eating, they might develop a duller sense of taste and smell, or they might experience an earlier sense of satiety (feeling full). Also, because, we didn't observe the anticipatory weight loss in men, the weight loss could have something specific to do with postmenopausal hormonal changes."

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Here is another LifeTwo article about research presented at the conference, and Here is a link to up-to-the-minute news from the conference.

The U.S. National Institute on Aging has Alzheimer's information here.