Having a parent with dementia may affect midlife memory

If your parents have been diagnosed with dementia  or Alzheimer’s disease (AD), you may be more likely to have memory loss yourself in middle years, according to a Boston University study presented this week at the American Academy of Neurology’s 61st annual meeting in Seattle.

In this report, three generations of participants in the Framingham Heart Study were followed by researchers to study risk factors of Alzheimer’s and other diseases. Scientists tested 715 people belonging to the second generation with an average age of 59. One group of 282 had one or both parents who had dementia; the other group of 433 people had parents without dementia.

Among people who had the risk factor (ApoE gene), those who had parents with AD or other dementia had two to three times the chance of having low verbal and visual memory performance than those with unaffected parents.  Author Stephanie Debette, M.D., Ph.D., likened the effect to 15 years of brain aging. It is notable that despite their poorer performance on the tests, all the individuals functioned normally.

Watch the video of our medical adviser, Orly Avitzur, reporting from the meeting in Seattle. She spoke to Dr. Debette about the findings in this study and asked her to describe her plans for further research in this area.

Read our article to determine if symptoms are suggestive of AD or just part of normal aging.

Comments

[Dr. Sandra Cottingham]

I have a question. Did they check each of the study participants for neurotoxic burden?
If a parent has a high level of lead, for example, there would be a high likelihood that their children would too - if the main source was work-related, parents bring lead home to their families - in the car, the laundry, etc. If was in the home, the food, the paint, then they shared a toxic environment. Years later, childhood lead is still in the adult body, stored in the brain tissues and bones.

Lead has been linked to dementia. So lead body burden ( as opposed to blood lead levels which are misleading) is a relevant factor. Digital x-rays can show a lifelong accumulation of lead in bones.

For an in-depth look at lead and its effect on the unborn child's, children's, teen's and adult's brains, visit www.nomoreleadbabies.com

Thanks, Dr. SC.