The study showed that participants of a group who carried a gene strongly linked to Alzheimer’s had worse performance in memory tests than the other group who had the same gene but did not have a parent with Alzheimer’s disease.

There are 715 people, averaged 59 years old, taking part in the ongoing Framingham Heart Study, including 282 whose parents, one or both, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or other dementia. When given a battery of cognitive tests, those who logged the lowest scores on verbal and visual memory tasks were people who were carriers of the ApoE4 gene and had parents with dementia. The difference in memory between the two groups was equivalent to approximately 15 years of brain aging, researchers found.

“How big an effect we saw was surprising,” said Dr. Sudha Seshadri, a BU associate professor of neurology and senior author of the study. “It was like you were comparing two groups, 55-year-olds to 70-year-olds.”

The study, which was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and released Wednesday, is to be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting, from April 25 to May 2, in Seattle.

VietNamNet/Xinhuanet