On a side note I know alot of people(not related to me) that are being affected with severe memory issues in their 60's and 70's. A friends Dad is in a memory care facility and he is in his mid 60's and was extremely fit(he was also a avid hunter - unsure if this was a cause). My Wife's aunt's Mom (not related by blood to her) has severe dementia and is in her 70's and needs $7k a month constant memory care. A friends mom has sundowners and every day her memory "erases", my Friend was looking into memory care for her and was quoted $13k a month for this. All these cases seem quite strange as the individuals led normal lives and then just started suffering these extreme memory/brain issues. I do not know what is causing it but I think its alot more widespread than people know.
Not true.
As someone who’s recently spoken to a genetic counselor about this very issue, this is basically a 180 degree turn.
Now, researchers say APOE4 shouldn’t just be recognized as a risk factor, it should be viewed as an inherited form of the disease, virtually assuring that a person who has two copies will get the biological changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease in their brains.
Just because an environmental factor is ubiquitous—-or is ubiquitous within the frame of some sampling bias for the study—-doesn’t mean we should conclude the cause does not exist.
Unless 95% of these populations also are assured an Alzheimer's diagnosis by 82, your chosen confounding statistics may have little bearing on how closely double copies of the APOE4 gene is associated with Alzheimer's diagnoses.
Without having much experience with early onset Alzheimer’s, I had always assumed that healthcare keeping people alive longer allowing people to live long enough to develop it was the reason it seemed to be more and more prevalent.
All I guess I really know for sure is that it’s a horrible fucking disease.
And you raise an important point... We're living longer. Medicine is getting better at that*. But we're not living better. In fact, afaik, a significant percentage of healthcare spending in is the last couple years of life.
* The same can be said of war. Fewer soldiers are dying but the otherside of that coin more survivors are ruined forever. Less death shouldn't make war any more acceptable.
I think to a degree we live better to a point*, but at a certain point of no return that longevity benefit of modern healthcare can create a poor quality of life where the peace of death would be preferable.
The genes might have a trigger. To ignore that possibility is foolish (to put it kindly).
Science shouldn't do this. And (real) journalism should know better as well.