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.
