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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – Alzheimer’s disease may cause different changes in the brains of black patients than those of white patients, according to a new study by researchers in the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Rush University Medical Center.
“Our study has important clinical implications, because it may suggest a need for different types of Alzheimer’s prevention and treatments in African-Americans,” says Lisa Barnes, Ph.D. study lead investigator and cognitive neuropsychologist at Rush.
“Current Alzheimer’s drugs primarily target specific Alzheimer’s pathologies in the brain. Given the mixed pattern of disease that we see in African-American brains, it will be important to develop new treatments that target these other common pathologies, particularly for African-Americans.”
The study results appear in the July 15, 2015, issue of the journal Neurology.
The study included 41 African-American patients with a clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s dementia, who had an autopsy of their brain performed after death. The autopsy results then were compared to those of 81 deceased white patients who had Alzheimer’s dementia with the same level of disease severity and were of the same age, sex and education level.
“Because some studies suggest that Alzheimer’s disease is more common among older African-Americans than European-Americans, we wanted to see whether the brain changes caused by Alzheimer’s are different in these two racial groups,” Barnes says. “Studying how Alzheimer’s disease looks in the brain in individuals of different races may help us to further understand the disease and pinpoint strategies for prevention and treatment.”
Researchers looked for typical signs of Alzheimer’s disease (brain plaques and tangles) as well as other brain changes that can cause dementia, such as infarcts (the brain changes associated with stroke) and Lewy bodies (clusters of protein in nerve cells associated with Lewy body or Parkinson’s disease). They noted whether people had just one pathology or more than one. They also looked at small and large blood vessel disease.
Almost all participants in the study had Alzheimer’s disease in their brain. Only about half of the white patients had pure Alzheimer’s disease pathology (with no additional pathologies contributing to dementia), and the rest of them had Alzheimer’s disease pathology with either infarcts or Lewy bodies.
In contrast, less than 25 percent of the black patients had pure Alzheimer’s disease pathology. On the other hand, almost three-quarters (71 percent) of them had Alzheimer’s disease pathology mixed with another type of pathology, compared to 51 percent of the white patients. Clinical Alzheimer’s disease in African-Americans was much more likely to involve pathologies other than Alzheimer’s disease pathology. They also had more frequent and severe blood vessel disease.
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Illinois Department of Public Health.
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