New research suggests that having a family history of Alzheimer’s may impair cognition throughout a person’s lifetime, but it also identifies factors that could offset these adverse effects. The findings may enable people at risk to take active measures for delaying or even preventing this form of dementia.

Share on Pinterest Having a first-degree relative, such as a parent, with Alzheimer’s disease may affect a person’s cognition, new research suggests.

Having a close relative with dementia is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.

In fact, it is one of the two most significant risk factors, together with age. Having a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s raises relative risk by 30%, which means that a person’s existing risk goes up by almost a third.

Having a copy of the gene APOE4 that encodes the protein apolipoprotein E raises Alzheimer’s risk by threefold. Having both copies of the gene — which is a rare occurrence — increases the risk by 10 to 15 times.

However, the medical research community has not given much attention to the effect that a family history of dementia has on a person’s cognition throughout their lives.

So, a team of scientists set out to explore this aspect by examining the link between having a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s and cognitive performance in almost 60,000 individuals aged between 18 and 85.

Joshua Talboom, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona, is the lead author of the new study, which appears in the journal eLife.