Diabetes May Double Alzheimer's Risk

Having type-2 diabetes can double people's risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. This finding, widely covered in the lay media, comes from a report in the journal Neurology. For 11 years, Japanese researchers followed more than 1,000 people aged 60 or older. Those with diabetes at the outset were 35 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer's than those without diabetes; those with the most severe diabetes had more than triple the risk.

Diabetes, however, is only one in a growing list of possible Alzheimer's risk factors. Having the e4 variant of the APOE gene is another. Moreover, having the e4 variant plus living in a hazardous neighborhood might predispose people to Alzheimer's even more than just having the APOE e4 variant, preliminary data suggest. Read more on this topic in Psychiatric News at http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/8/27.full.

For more information on Alzheimer's risk factors in general, see The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias. Purchasing information is posted at http://www.appi.org/SearchCenter/Pages/SearchDetail.aspx?ItemId=62278.

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