The risk of inheriting Alzheimer’s disease from the mother is significantly greater than the risk of inheriting the disease from the father, according to scientists from the US in the journal Neurology.
According to statistics, people with parents with Alzheimer’s are 4 to 10 times more likely to develop the disease than people with no family history of the disease.
Robyn Honea of the University of Kansas School of Medicine (USA) and her team studied 53 healthy people aged 60 years and over. At the start of the study, participants were free from dementia and their health was monitored for 2 years. Among the respondents, 11 people had mothers with Alzheimer’s disease, and 10 people had fathers with this disease, the remaining 32 people had no family history of Alzheimer’s.
During the two years of the project, participants had brain imaging and various cognitive tests to assess their memory.
The researchers observed that people whose mothers had Alzheimer’s had twice as much contraction of the gray matter in the brain as the rest of the study participants. In addition, the brain of these people lost volume about 1,5 times faster (per year) than the brain of the rest of the respondents. Brain shrinkage, also known as volume loss or atrophy, is one of the main symptoms of developing Alzheimer’s disease. (PAP)