Last summer, an investigation made public by Alzheimer Europe showed that Alzheimer’s disease is at the top of the second most feared diseases , after cancer. This fear is all the more real since the WHO has announced that, according to its statistics, cases of dementia (which are caused in a large majority of cases by Alzheimer’s disease) should double by 2030 and triple in here 2050!
Also, the results of the study which has just been published in the journal Nature Genetics, are they likely to interest (even reassure) many people! This study indeed makes it possible to take a big step towards understanding Alzheimer’s disease by pointing out the genetic mutations that alter the hippocampus, that part of the brain where the memory impairment in general, and Alzheimer’s disease in particular, begin.
For this study, the researchers peeled “epidemiological studies analyzing the genomes and brain MRIs of 9,232 participants aged 56 to 84 years“, in Europe and North America, including about 2,000 in France. It appeared that genetic mutations are involved in the reduction of the size of the hippocampus. However, the study specifies that the triggers of these genetic mutations do not are not “still identified“.
