August 8, 2012 — Alzheimer's disease (AD) has milder expression in people in their 80s than it does when it first manifests in younger individuals, a new study suggests.
"The greatest risk factor for Alzheimer's disease is advancing age," Dominic Holland, PhD, from the Department of Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego, told Medscape Medical News. "The likelihood of developing AD by age 85 is about 50%, but we have found that people in their 60s and 70s, or the 'younger elderly,' who get AD show faster rates of brain tissue loss and cognitive decline than do the older elderly."
These findings have profound implications not only for diagnosing AD, but for finding new treatments, the researchers say.
The results were published online August 2 in PLOS One.
Inconsistent Results
Dr. Holland told Medscape Medical News that he was prompted to do the current study after reading some cross-sectional studies of AD that took each subject's age into account.
"Taken together and looked at closely, the papers gave some inconsistent results," he said. "At issue were models for prevalence of AD pathology with age, and incidence of AD dementia with age. It seemed to me that something interesting was going on with the older elderly — those around 85 years and older."/.../
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