Children of Alzheimer's-stricken Mothers Face Higher Risk

People whose mothers had late-onset Alzheimer's disease are at an increased risk to undergo brain metabolism changes that might lead to Alzheimer's, a mind-robbing condition, according to new findings presented at the Alzheimer's Association 2008 International Alzheimer's Disease Conference held in Chicago.

The study by scientists at NYU Langone Medical Center suggests that having a parent or sibling with this memory fading disease is a known risk factor for Alzheimer's.

Our new study shows that subjects with a mother with Alzheimer's show similarities with Alzheimer's patients," says Dr. Lisa Mosconi, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York. "They have metabolic reductions in the brain regions that are typically affected by AD, which worsen over time," she says.

Mosconi and colleagues reached their findings after studying 66 healthy adults, from 50 to 82 years old, with no signs of Alzheimer's, dementia, or milder mental problems. Of them, twenty participants had mothers with the disease, while nine had fathers with Alzheimer's and the rest had no family history of the disease.

Mosconi’s team first studied glucose metabolism in the brain of the participants, using PETdefine scans and a technique that labels glucose with a chemical tracer (FDG-PET).

After a two-year period, the researchers found that individuals with a maternal history of the Alzheimer's had a much faster progressive reduction in the use of glucose in areas of the brain affected by the disease than people who had a father with Alzheimer's or parents without the disease.

"Overall, these findings show that their brains are not working properly to start with, and the metabolic impairment gets worsen over time," Mosconi explains.

It is now evident that having a parent, especially mother, affected with AD escalates the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease four- to tenfold, Mosconi said.

However, she noted that it doesn't mean that children of parents who have both been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) will definitely develop Alzheimer's disease later in life. "If you're at risk of Alzheimer's because your mother had the disease, you need to make sure that you take special care of your health" in order to keep Alzheimer's disease from developing.

At this point, it can be speculated that genesdefine that are maternally inherited may alter brain metabolism," Mosconi said. "We need to follow subjects for longer time periods to ascertain whether the metabolic reductions are in fact forerunning cognitive deterioration."

Alzheimer’s is mainly a neurological disorder where a person slowly and progressively starts loosing his memory due to gradual loss of brain cells. It is the most common form of dementia (loss of intellectual ability) and is the fourth leading cause of deaths in adults according to National Institute of Health (NIH).

Alzheimer's affects almost half of all patients with dementia. The most striking early symptom of Alzheimer’s is loss of short term memory. As the disorder progresses, cognitive injury extends to the domains of language (aphasia), skilled movements (apraxia), recognition (agnosia), and those functions (such as decision-making and planning) closely related to the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain.