A Few More Genes for Alzheimer's

A pair of papers published today in Nature Genetics reports on new genes associated with Alzheimer's disease, bringing the total number of genes associated with the disease to 10, The New York Times says. One group of researchers studied Europeans with Alzheimer's and the other studied Americans, and both groups homed in on similar genes. The newly unearthed genes increase a person's risk of developing the disease by about 10 percent to 15 percent — a more modest effect than that of APOE, which can raises a person's risk by 400 percent to 1,000 percent depending on the number of copies of the gene the person has, the Times adds. "If we could eliminate the detrimental effects of all 10 variants, we would eliminate 60% of Alzheimer's disease," says senior author Julie Williams from Cardiff University in the UK's Guardian.