Alzheimer’s disease is an extremely discussed condition, one that can cause people to suffer from a diversity of problems. These severe symptoms include mood swings, language problems, and, of course memory loss.
Dementia Isn’t a Specific Disease
According to the Alzheimer’s Association, dementia is not actually a disease, despite what many people believe.
In fact, dementia refers to a large number of symptoms, like communication problems or other issues big enough to interfere with and interrupt normal daily life.
alzheimer’s disease affects African-Americans differently than European-Americans
In accordance with a new research from the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Alzheimer’s disease affects people differently, depending on their race.
For this study, researchers investigated the brain autopsy of 122 individuals, 41 being African Americans while 81 European-Americans.
The results revealed that almost all patients showed signs of Alzheimer’s disease. What was curious was that not more than 19.5 percent of the African-Americans investigated had Alzheimer’s disease as single dementia pathology. The same result was found for 42 percent of the studied European Americans.
Another result of this research showed that in 51 percent of the European-American brains was found another type of brain pathology mixed with Alzheimer’s, compared to the 71 percent of African-Americans.
In addition to these answers, it seems that a high risk of severe blood vessel disease was found in the studied African-Americans’ brains.
The Study Could Strongly Influence How Alzheimer’s Disease is Treated
According to this research, the risk of suffering from different types of brain changes is higher for African-Americans.
And this result can have important implications when it comes to how Alzheimer’s disease is treated. Current Alzheimer’s drugs target specific Alzheimer’s disease pathology in the brain, but since the disease has different effects, depending on race, a new treatment will probably be needed to also target other types of common pathologies.
Alzheimer’s is a dangerous disease and this is the reason why it is extremely important to raise awareness about it in both European-American, as well as African-American communities. People should be aware of the implications of this disease, and everybody should report when experiencing any of the symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s and dementia.
The results, found by the Rush University Medical Center study are published in the journal Neurology.
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Does Alzheimer"s Disease Affect Races Differently?
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