Intact 4/3's or 4/4's in their 90's

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Kenny4/4
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Re: Intact 4/3's or 4/4's in their 90's

Post by Kenny4/4 »

There are 4/4's that make the 100 year mark per this study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7746404 .
"The percentage of ApoE epsilon 4 alleles among the centenarians was 8.7% (31 of 358 alleles). This is significantly lower than percentages found in younger Finnish populations. Thirty (16.8%) of the 179 centenarians were epsilon 4 allele carriers."
Doing simple math tells us that one of the centenarians was a 4/4. It does not define whether this APOE4 homozygote had dementia but it wouldn't be a bad guess that even if they were they were probably not suffering from dementia during their mid 90's as 4's tend to decline quickly when they are diagnosed with dementia.
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Re: Intact 4/3's or 4/4's in their 90's

Post by NF52 »

Fiver wrote:If the question is "can 4/4s live to an old age without AD?" it would be easier to jump into a large study of 80- or 90-year olds, identify the 4/4s, and compare the frequency to what would be expected in the general population. I mean, just from the standpoint of study design.
Brian4 wrote:NF52, there are plenty of heterozygous epsilon-4 carriers out there at advanced ages without dementia, but I was speaking specifically about 4/4s.Brian
Fair question, Brian. Here's one example, from a group of folks who lived in "Leisure World" in California. (Maybe the name itself helped them to reach their 90's!) Seems to meet Fiver's idea of looking at folks in their 90's in the community and following them.
Participants were members of The 90+ Study, a population-based longitudinal study of aging and dementia in people aged 90 years and older. Participants were originally members of the Leisure World Cohort Study, an epidemiological health study of a California retirement community initiated in the early 1980s. Leisure World Cohort members alive and aged 90 years and older as of January 1, 2003 or January 1, 2008 and later were invited to join The 90+ Study. Of all eligible cohort members, 83% joined the study. Participants did not differ from nonparticipants on sex (78% vs 79% women), age at the time of the invitation to The 90+ Study (mean 5 93 years for both groups), or chronic disease history and lifestyle characteristics at time
of entry into the Leisure World Cohort....Consistent with other studies [5,9] we found that APOE 4/4 homozygotes can reach very old age without dementia. We had two APOE 4/ 4 participants who were not demented at their baseline evaluation. They did, however, develop dementia during follow-up.
Apolipoprotein E genotype, dementia, and mortality in the oldest old: The 90+ Study
[Note: They had a total of 3 ApoE 4/4 participants, out of 802 participants. Of those 802, 29% had dementia at baseline. So the 4/4's were among the 71% without dementia at baseline, with an average age of 93! Of 82 participants with at least one ApoE 4, (including two with an ApoE 2) 32 developed dementia during the study, but that gave a stated odds ratio of 1.04 compared to ApoE 3/3s. I also don't expect to live to my 90's, but appreciate the 90+ youngsters in Leisure World who volunteered for this study!
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Re: Intact 4/3's or 4/4's in their 90's

Post by Brian4 »

Heartening news!

Though I still think we should all travel to Sweden next summer to find the long-lived epsilon-4 carriers. We can go to Leisure World in the winter!

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Re: Intact 4/3's or 4/4's in their 90's

Post by Kenny4/4 »

Brian4 wrote:Heartening news!

Though I still think we should all travel to Sweden next summer to find the long-lived epsilon-4 carriers. We can go to Leisure World in the winter!

Brian
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Re: Intact 4/3's or 4/4's in their 90's

Post by PeterM »

And there is this from Science Daily:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 105739.htm
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Re: Intact 4/3's or 4/4's in their 90's

Post by Gillyp »

Thanks for sharing the link to Science Daily PeterM and, as this is your first post, let me officially welcome to the APOE4.info community.

There's so much information on the site that you might find interesting and useful. Both the Primer (viewtopic.php?f=33&t=1418) and the Wiki Page (https://wiki.apoe4.info/wiki/%22How-To% ... fo_website) may help you use your time on the site more efficiently. The search feature is also pretty powerful. When the time is right for you we would love to hear a little more about your story which you could post on the Our Stories forum.

As you dig further into the site, please feel free to reach out to me, or anyone else, if you have any questions. We are all here to support one another and learn together. A warm welcome once again and keep posting.
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Re: Intact 4/3's or 4/4's in their 90's

Post by NF52 »

PeterM wrote:And there is this from Science Daily:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 105739.htm
Welcome, Peter!

The article you linked to references a longitudinal (i.e. long-term) study of what I think of as a wonderful group of folks in Olmstead County, Minnesota, home to the Mayo Clinic. Because these people tend not to move away when they retire ( who would want to leave a Minnesota winter for the warm South?!), and because they have a strong participatory ethos, they have been the subject of dozens of useful studies, including several on ApoE 4. That may be because Minnesota has a large population of Swedish and Norwegian descendants, a population that tends to skew higher for ApOE 4, along with Finnish. (As a former Minnesotan, I was amazed to find that Larson, Larsson, and Larsen took up about 7 pages of the phone book.) So maybe the Swedes in Europe living to 95 and those in Minnesota living to 95 have indeed found the secret: embrace the 30 below wind chills and the social connections cited in your article.

Hope you'll share some more finds with us.

And by the way, anybody named Peter, Peterson, Peterssen etc. would be welcomed in Minnesota!
4/4 and still an optimist!
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