Health Day News, February 28th, 2011

A new study adds more weight
to research showing the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease is greater
if your mother, rather than your father, had the disorder.

Brain scans of adult children of people with Alzheimer’s found more
shrinkage in key brain regions of those whose mothers had the disease than
in those whose fathers had it, the researchers report. Brain shrinkage is
a characteristic of the age-related disorder.

“It’s consistent with other studies that suggest there is something
inherited from mothers that influences risk more so than what is passed
down through fathers,” said senior study author Dr. Jeffrey Burns, an
associate professor of neurology at University of Kansas Medical
Center.

Alzheimer’s disease has a strong inherited component, according to
background information in the study. Those whose parents had the disease
are four to 10 times more likely to get the disease themselves.

In the study, researchers created three-dimensional maps, using a
technology called voxel-based morphometry, of the brains of 53 people aged
60 and older. Eleven had a mother with Alzheimer’s, 10 had a father with
Alzheimer’s and the rest had no family history of the disease.

None of the participants had dementia when they were recruited, nor did
they show the signs of mental decline that can be an early indicator of
the disease, researchers said.

After two years, people whose mothers had Alzheimer’s had twice the
amount of gray matter atrophy, or shrinkage, in brain regions known to be
affected by Alzheimer’s compared to those with a paternal history or no
family history of the disease. The regions included the parahippocampal
gyrus and the precuneus.

Those with a maternal history of Alzheimer’s also had one and a half
times more loss in whole brain volume each year compared to those with a
paternal history or no family history of the disease.

The study is published in the March 1 issue of Neurology.

Read more of this article.

Health Day News, February 14th, 2011

Adults who experience hearing
loss may face a higher risk of dementia and perhaps Alzheimer’s disease
than those who don’t suffer hearing loss, new research suggests.

And the greater the loss, the greater the risk, the study
suggested.

“This work suggests that there is a strong predictive association
between hearing loss as an adult and the likelihood of developing
cognitive decline with aging,” said study lead author Dr. Luigi Ferrucci,
chief of the U.S. National Institute on Aging’s Longitudinal Studies
Section, as well as director of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of
Aging.

Ferrucci and his colleagues report their findings in the February issue
of the journal Archives of Neurology.

The authors noted that by the middle of the century, about 100 million
men and women worldwide (about one in 85) will be affected by
dementia.

The researchers’ investigation into the potential association between
hearing loss and dementia focused on 639 men and women between the ages of
36 and 90, none of whom had dementia at the start of the study in
1990.

Cognitive and hearing tests were conducted over a four-year period,
followed by patient tracking through 2008 (for an average of about 12
years) to monitor for signs of dementia and/or Alzheimer’s.

The researchers noted that 125 study participants were diagnosed with
“mild” hearing loss, while another 53 had “moderate” loss, and six had
“severe” loss.

Ultimately, 58 patients were diagnosed with dementia, of whom 37 had
Alzheimer’s disease.

By cross-referencing their data, the researchers found that mild
hearing loss was linked to a slight increase in dementia risk, but the
risk increased noticeably among those with moderate and severe hearing
loss.

Read more of this article.