Children born to older fathers are more likely to succumb to Alzheimer's disease
alzheimer's disease is the commonest form of dementia afflicting millions across the world. Patients with the disease slowly loose all powers of thought and are eventually reduced to vegetables completely dependant on others for their survival. A lot of research has gone to find a cure or, at least, a preventive treatment.
Now, German researchers at the Technical University of Munich say that children born to older fathers have a higher risk of succumbing to Alzheimer's. Older mothers are more likely to give birth to babies with Down's syndrome, and people with Down's are more susceptible to Alzheimer's disease. Intrigued by the association between these two mental disorders, Lars Bertram and his colleagues wondered if parental age plays any direct role in Alzheimer's.
The researchers studied 206 Alzheimer's patients. Susceptibility to the disease is linked to certain major genes, so the first step was to try to establish each patient's inherited risk. To do this, Bertram and his team found out the incidence of Alzheimer's in each patient's family.
Then they examined groups of patients at each extreme -- comparing those least likely to have the disease genes with those who were most likely to have them. They hoped to find an added risk factor among the first group to explain why they developed Alzheimer's.
Patients least likely to have inherited a major disease-carrying gene had fathers who were significantly older than fathers of the second group and fathers of people of the same age who were not suffering from Alzheimer's ( Nerogenetics , Vol 1, p 77).
Fathers of this low-risk, low-probability group had been around 35 years old when their child was born, while fathers of the group least likely to have a disease gene were some 31.3 years old at the birth of their child.
As people grow older, suspect the researchers, damage builds up in their dioxyribose nucleic acid ( dna ) and gets passed on to their children. "There is an accumulation of environmental factors which somehow affect the genome of the father," says Bertram.
"The findings are extremely interesting," says Simon Lovestone, an Alzheimer's disease specialist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.
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