Their study shows substantial evidence that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease may manifest substantially earlier than previously thought.
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Findings revealed that participants who tested lower on the first year of the study were about 10 times more likely to be diagnosed with the health issue later.
For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from more than 2,000 African- and European-American people from Chicago with an average age of 73 years old.
Alzheimer’s could be predicted with thinking and memory tests.
Kumar B Rajan, who might be the editor of the research and Rush University Medical Center in Chicago said in a very very testimony where the changes in reasoning and storage memory that in fact head apparent indications of Alzheimer’s disease actually kicks off years before it has been established.
According to study researchers, “These associations were consistently larger among European Americans than among African Americans”. The researcher reported that a total of “442 (21 percent) developed clinical [Alzheimer’s disease] dementia over 18 years of follow-up”.
Based on tests completed 13 to 18 years before the final assessments took place, one unit lower in performance of the standardised cognitive test score was associated with an 85 per cent greater risk (relative risk of 1.85) of future dementia. One past study showed a causal link between poor sleep and the disease later on in life.
Rajan added that though it isn’t possible to detect such changes in individuals who might be at risk, they were able to observe those individuals among a group who eventually developed dementia due to Alzheimer’s. And hence understanding these processes when a person approaches the middle age can help prevent the disease.
“The changes in thinking and memory that precede obvious symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease begin decades before”.
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The good news is that doctors may now have more time to intervene in a prospective patient’s care to delay the effects of the degenerative disease, which affects 5.3 million Americans. These odds increased as the scores dropped below average, the study published online June 24 in the journal Neurology found.
