GOOD news for men: carrying a copy of the "Alzheimer's gene" doesn't significantly raise the risk of developing the disease.
In 1993, it was discovered that people with Alzheimer's were more likely to carry a variant of the APOE gene called APOE4. The received wisdom is that having one copy raises disease risk, while having two elevates it even more.
But it's not quite as simple as that. To explore if this risk was related to gender, Michael Greicius at Stanford University and colleagues looked at 5500 healthy people who had been tested for their APOE variant between 2005 and 2013. During this time, 960 were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or a precursor to it.
Women with a single copy of APOE4 were 1.8 times more likely to fall into this group than women without the variant. For men, carrying a copy didn't raise their risk (Annals of Neurology, DOI: 10.1002/ana.24135).
However, women carrying a single copy of the APOE4 variant had the same chance of developing the disease as men without it – a puzzling result given that women are thought to be more susceptible to Alzheimer's.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Gender bias in Alzheimer's risk"
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