If Hispanics are more prone to Alzheimer’s disease, and you are not Hispanic, what does it matter to you?* Plenty.
** *In a much emailed New York Times story recently, reporter Pam Belluck observed that Hispanics are more likely to get Alzheimer’s than members of other ethnic groups and then proceeded to ponder why that would be.** She listed diabetes, which has been linked to dementia, as well as dislocation, which can cause social isolation, which can exacerbate memory problems.* Obviously, these conditions are not limited to one ethnic group or another—they pose risks for all of us.* That they are concentrated in one demographic merely serves to amplify their dangers for all of us.
** *What was missing, strangely, from the Times piece, was the role genetics might play in this phenomenon.* Though one physician interviewed said there was no genetic connection, research shows that he is, most likely, wrong.* A few years ago, medical researchers in upper Manhattan who were surveying the residents of Washington Heights, which is the neighborhood near Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, noticed that the Hispanics they were studying were three times more likely than either whites or blacks to have Alzheimer’s disease.* As the lead researcher, Dr. Richard Mayeux told me, this seemed unlikely to have been a coincidence; when you find a non-communicable disease moving through a population like that, the first things you think about are environment and genes.
** *Since many of the people in Washington Heights came from the Dominican Republic, Mayeux and his team decided to go to the DR to do the same kind of epidemiological study they’d done in NYC, and also to look at the genes of those subjects and their relatives in the US.* In so doing, they have amassed the largest genetic library of Alzheimer’s disease in the world.
** *It was through this work that it became very clear that (no matter your ethnicity), Alzheimer’s runs in families.* This doesn’t mean that if your father, say, had AD, you will too.* (This would only be true if you inherited the gene that causes early-onset AD, which is very rare.)* It does mean that if he had AD, your risk goes up.* (If nothing else, this should inspire you to take exercise, eat right, and stay mentally fit, since not doing these things also increases your risk.)
** *Once the Columbia researchers determined that there were family ties, they joined with researchers at Boston University and the University of Toronto, who had their own genetic databases, to look for what are called “risk factor” genes.* Risk factor genes also do not cause disease but, rather, as their name implies, increase the chance of getting it.* After many years of looking, the researchers did one, SorLa, that, they believe, accounts in some measure for the increased number of AD patients in the Hispanic community. *
** *This is important research for all of us, no matter our ethnicity, because it begins to show how this disease travels, opens the door to further research into the connection between genes and environment, suggests to geneticists which chromosomes to examine, and gives drug makers another target.* This is all good stuff and it was, unfortunately, overlooked in the New York Times.
** *If you want to read more about the search for SorLa, and the work being done to understand Alzheimer's for all us through the Hispanic community in Washington Heights, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, read the piece I wrote in the December 12, 2005 New Yorker magazine called “The Gene Hunters.”


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