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| |  Poverty, Poor Education In Childhood Can Greatly Increase Risk Of Alzheimer's TAMPA, FL -- July 21, 1998 -- Poverty and poor education in childhood can greatly increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease in later life, according to researchers from the University of South Florida and Algene Biotechnologies in Montreal. The chance of having Alzheimer's disease was found to be five to 11 times higher in people with a family history of the illness who experienced poverty in childhood or were poorly educated. Neither poverty nor low education influenced the risk of getting Alzheimer's in people from families where none of the brothers or sisters had the disease. The combination of a family history of Alzheimer's disease and childhood poverty led to a particularly high risk. People with both of these characteristics were more than 30 times as likely to have Alzheimer's disease in late life compared to those without a family history of the illness who grew up in families unaffected by poverty. "We may be able to prevent a large number of cases through improved nutrition and better education in childhood when the brain is developing to its adult size," said James Mortimer, Ph.D., director of the USF Institute on Aging and lead author of the report. The study results were presented at the sixth International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders held in Amsterdam, July 18 to 23. The research was sponsored by a grant from the National Institute on Aging. The findings were based on a study of 122 people with Alzheimer's disease and 279 unaffected individuals of similar age and sex. People with and without the disease were identified from a population survey of almost 2,000 residents aged 70 and over living in Quebec. "Rather than low education and poverty causing Alzheimer's disease higher education and relative affluence in childhood appeared to protect individuals with a genetic risk of Alzheimer's from getting the symptoms of the illness," Dr. Mortimer said. He added that earlier studies had shown that better development, reflected in a larger brain size, substantially reduced the risk of Alzheimer's in late life, likely by providing a reserve of extra brain tissue that permitted individuals with the disease to cover up its symptoms.
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