Impaired Learning Linked to Family History of Alzheimer's

A study in eLife found adults who have a first-degree relative with Alzheimer's perform more poorly on online paired-learning tasks than adults without such a family history, which may be worsened with diabetes or a genetic variation in the apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene, reports ScienceDaily . These findings may help spot people at a higher risk for developing Alzheimer's, and perhaps find new ways to delay or prevent the disease. Participants were asked to learn 12-word pairs, and evaluated on their ability to complete the missing half of the pair when presented with one of the words. Participants also were asked to answer questions about their sex, education, age, language, country, and health, including a question about whether they had a family history of Alzheimer's. Those who did could match about two and one-half fewer word pairs than those without a family history, but diabetes appeared to exacerbate difficulties in persons with a family history. A cohort with a close relative with Alzheimer's submitted a sample of dried blood or saliva tested for a genetic variation in the APOE gene linked to Alzheimer's. "We found that those with the variation performed worse on the memory test than those without the variation," said the Translational Genomics Research Institute's Joshua Talboom.