Who's Likely to Develop Alzheimer's, and When?

Danish studies of data on 104,537 people in Copenhagen published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal sought to uncover how certain factors, including a person's age and gender, determined their 10-year risk of developing dementia, while also probing whether participants carried the APOE protein gene, reports MedPageToday . The researchers learned that a confluence of an individual's age, sex, and whether or not they had a common form of the APOE gene could offer a prediction of whether they might develop dementia. Women in their 60s had a 7 percent risk, compared with 6 percent for men. In the 10 years following their 70th birthday, their risk rose to 16 percent and 12 percent respectively, climbing to 24 percent and 19 percent for those 80 and older.