People With Down Syndrome Are Pioneers In Alzheimer's Research

[KamaAina]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/08/25/341672950/people-with-down-syndrome-are-pioneers-in-alzheimers-research

Alzheimer's researchers are increasingly interested in people like McCowan because "people with Down syndrome represent the world's largest population of individuals predisposed to getting Alzheimer's disease," says Michael Rafii, director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at UCSD.

Down syndrome is a genetic disorder that's best known for causing intellectual disability. But it also causes Alzheimer's. "By the age of 40, 100 percent of all individuals with Down syndrome have the pathology of Alzheimer's in their brain," Rafii says....

And that has created a huge opportunity for Alzheimer's research, says William Mobley, chairman of the neuroscience department at UCSD. "This is the one group in the world that you could argue would benefit most by the institution of early therapy," he says.

Early therapy means starting people on drug treatment years before the symptoms of Alzheimer's appear. The approach has been hard to test because, in the general population, there's no good way to know who is going to develop Alzheimer's. But for people with Down syndrome, it's a near certainty.

[Cirque du So-What]

1. Heard this on the way home the other day

on NPR's All Things Considered. I was unaware that those with Down syndrome almost always develop Alzheimer's. In the not-so-distant past, not that many with Down syndrome lived long enough to develop Alzheimer's, even though the onset is earlier with this group of people.