Alzheimer's Risk Gene

In the year of 1993 scientist discovered the cause of Alzheimer's disease but the scary part is that the gene starts to do damage not when you're old but when you are young. Scientist know the genetic component to develop the late-onset of Alzheimer's is the gene known as ApoE4 that is carried in about a quarter of us that triples the risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. In 2009 however, three more risky genes were found, and one of the three, called clusterin, or CLU, was found to give a 16 percent more chance of the having disease. The CLU gene was a gene nobody could explain what it did but experts on the gene or UCLA researchers know this risk gene begins to damage your brain a full 50 years before people usually get Alzheimer's. A UCLA professor of neurology, named Paul Thompson and his colleagues say the C-allele of the CLU gene possesses 88 percent of Caucasians which impairs the development of myelin also known as the protective covering around the neuron's axons in the brain making it weaker and makes it easier for it to get the onset of Alzheimer's much later in life. Researchers experimented on 398 healthy adult brains between ages 20 to 30 by scanning their brains with a high-magnetic-fields diffusion scan called a 4-Tesla DTI. This devise maps the brain's connections. They compared the brains with the C-allele with those with the CLU T-allele. They discovered that C-allele carriers or CLU-C carriers had "fractional anisotropy" a large mass of white-matter integrity in many parts of the brain including parts that cause Alzheimer's. so, young, healthy carries of the C-allele may increase the vulnerability of the disease later in life.
"For example, Alzheimer's has traditionally been considered a key disease component and another possible pathway to the disease, and this discovery supports that," Thompson said. He also says that "four things are surprising with the discovery of this gene's function:
1- This risk gene damages your brain a full 50 years before people normally get Alzheimer's. The damage can be seen on a MRI scan, but there are no sypmtoms yet.
2-It's now known what this mysterious gene does--namely, make your brain wiring vulnarable to attack by impairing the wiring before any senile plaques or tangle develop.
3-Rather than being a gene that few people have, a whopping 88 percent of Caucasians have it. ' So i guess you could say the other 12 percent have an Alzheimer's resistance gene that protects their brain wiring'
4- finnaly knowing the role of this gene is useful in predicting a person's risk of the disease and in seeing if you can step in and protect the brain in the 50-year time window you have before the disease begins to develope."
Yes, the easy question is if most of us have the gene, why isn't Alzheimer's rampant in young people? Less myelination in CLU-C carriers may not translate into a worse cognition in youth because the brain can deal with it or compensate. "The brain has a lot of built in redundancy-- miles and miles of brain connections," Thompson exclaimed. still, he continued, with the passage of time-- and when exacerbated by other factors, such as normal neuron death as we age and plaque and tangle development in the early stages of Alzeihmer's-- deuce myelin integrity could facilitate cognition impairement. With this discovery the science discovery of diseases can help them understand and control the amount of death in the world.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110513091638.htm

Other authors included Meredith N. Braskie, Neda Jahanshad, Jason L. Stein, Marina Barysheva, John M. Ringman and Arthur W. Toga from UCLA; Katie L. McMahon and Greig I. de Zubicaray from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia; and Nicholas G. Martin and Margaret J. Wright from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane.

This study was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia; the National Institutes of Health; the UCLA Easton Center for Alzheimer's Disease Research; the NIH/National Library of Medicine; the ARCS Foundation; and the National Institute of Mental Health.