Is Alzheimer's disease hereditary?
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Sep 8, 2017
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Dr. Larry Lawhorne discusses the hereditary component of Alzheimer’s disease.
Is Alzheimer's disease hereditary?
One of the big questions that people often have is, if Alzheimer's disease is in my family, am I at increased risk? The answer is complicated. Certainly, there’s a genetic component to Alzheimer's disease and across the globe, there are studies that show that certain chromosomal changes, certain changes in genetic makeup will increase the risk dramatically for having Alzheimer's disease and some of the other dementias but mostly Alzheimer's disease. In the US in particular and especially in our area, the Miami Valley, we don’t really have these strong familial patterns of inheritance for Alzheimer's disease but clearly, if there’s Alzheimer's disease in the family, you are at increased risk.
There are some genetic studies that can be done that look at APOE and other things that you may have heard of but these aren’t really all that helpful in terms of whether you'll get it or not. Even if it were, one of the conversations that I have a lot is, if you're not going to get this until you're 70 or 80 years old, you can do a lot of living between now and the time you reach 70 or 80. Unless or until there’s a treatment for this, I’m not sure that you would want to go and have a lot of genetic testing done.
We worry about people who have lots of Alzheimer's disease in their family in terms of their risk and we have conversations about that. We talk about the things that they should put in place and do just in case but we also look at other things like head injuries and that sort of thing, vascular risk factors when we’re trying to help people decide what to do about the possibility of getting Alzheimer's disease later.