Scientists are digging into why a few people escape the rarest form of Alzheimer's, which is inherited and strikes young Every so often, someone dodges their family's genetic fate
Doug Whitney inherited the same gene mutation that gave Alzheimer’s disease to his mother, brother and generations of other relatives by the unusually young age of 50.So did a woman in Colombia who dodged her own family’s similar Alzheimer’s destiny for nearly three decades.
“We are just learning about this approach to the disease,” said neuropsychologist Yakeel Quiroz of Massachusetts General Hospital, who helped study the Colombian woman. “One person can actually change the world -- as in her case, how much we have learned from her.” Now scientists are on the lookout for even more Alzheimer’s escapees — people who may have simply assumed they didn’t inherit their family’s mutation because they’re healthy long after the age their loved ones always get sick.
Answers can’t come quickly enough for Whitney’s son Brian, who also inherited the devastating family gene. He's reached the fateful age of 50 without symptoms but knows that’s no guarantee. Less than 1% of Alzheimer’s is caused by inheriting a single copy of a particular mutated gene. Children of an affected parent have a 50-50 chance of inheriting the family Alzheimer’s gene. If they do, they’re almost guaranteed to get sick at about the same age as their parent did.
Whitney’s grandparents had 14 children and 10 of them developed early-onset Alzheimer’s. The first red flag for his mother: Thanksgiving 1971, when she forgot the pumpkin pie recipe she’d always made from memory.Back then doctors didn’t know much about Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t until the 1990s that separate research teams proved three different genes, when mutated, can each cause this uniquely inherited form of the disease. They each speed abnormal amyloid buildup.
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