Investigators Seek Ways to Detect and Delay Early Alzheimer’s
Investigators Seek Ways to Detect and Delay Early Alzheimer’s – In his magical-realist masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez takes the reader to the mythical jungle village of Macondo, where, in one oft-recounted scene, residents suffer from a disease that causes them to lose all memory. The malady erases “the name and notion of things and finally the identity of people.” The symptoms persist until a traveling gypsy turns up with a drink “of a gentle color” that returns them to health.
In a 21st-century parallel to the townspeople of Macondo, a few hundred residents from Medellín, Colombia, and nearby coffee-growing areas have begun to assist in the search for something akin to a real-life version of the gypsy’s concoction.
Medellín and its environs are home to the world’s largest contingent of individuals with a hereditary form of Alzheimer’s disease. Members of 26 extended families, with more than 5,000 members, develop early-onset familial Alzheimer’s, usually before the age of 50, if they harbor an aberrant version of a particular gene, known as the “paisa” mutation.
Francisco Lopera, the neurologist who 28 years ago discovered the aberrant gene is contacting the families with this gene to participate in a test of drugs for Alzheimer’s.
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