- Dementia cases are rising fast globally, yet there is little understanding of the exact causes of different types of dementia. They are thought to be both environmental and genetic.
- Much of the focus of research into genetic risk factors of dementia has been on Alzheimer’s disease.
- New research has identified a number of genetic variants linked to other forms of dementia.
- The findings show a specific genetic variant that’s been associated with Alzheimer’s is also linked to Lewy body and frontotemporal dementia.
Every year there are over 10 million new cases of dementia, around two-thirds of which are diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
As such, a significant amount of research focus has been on Alzheimer’s disease and its potential causes.
In 2022, a study in
One genetic risk factor — a variant of the
In contrast, research into genetic risk factors that affect other types of dementia including Lewy body dementia and frontotemporal dementia, have received less attention. This is despite the fact that it is possible to have more than one type of dementia at once.
To gain greater insight into the genetic structural variants that could be linked to Lewy body and frontotemporal dementia, researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently carried out whole genome sequencing on 5,213 individuals with these types of dementia, and compared them to 4,132 controls who did not have dementia.
The results show that a genetic variant previously associated with Alzheimer’s is also linked to other forms of dementia. The results are published in Cell Genomics.
Scientists used a type of whole…
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