apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

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TheresaB
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Re: apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

Post by TheresaB »

Mitrofan wrote:Well, I read the opposite, too, that APOE4 may represent an example of antagonistic pleiotropy. -that was a new word I learned :) -

here is the paper:
https://zenpatient.com/blog/dr-rhonda-p ... lzheimers/

snippet
...APOE4 is associated with better cognition and intelligence early in life but earlier declines as we age (an example of antagonistic pleiotropy).
You can google "antagonistic pleiotropy apoe4"
Was the blog from Dr Patrick all you found? While I respect the work of Dr Patrick immensely, I didn't see a study referenced. Regardless, your citation is the same as the conclusion of the study Genetic Burden for Late-Life Neurodegenerative Disease and Its Association With Early-Life Lipids, Brain, Behavior, and Cognition that I referenced above. Since the study I cited was just published yesterday, if there is another study, I'd like to know.
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Re: apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

Post by slacker »

roxanne wrote:I might get dementia one day but when I was young I wasn't less intelligent than APOe3 kids.
thanks for sharing; you are amazing!
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Re: apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

Post by NF52 »

Mitrofan wrote:Well, I read the opposite, too, that APOE4 may represent an example of antagonistic pleiotropy. -that was a new word I learned :) -

here is the paper:
https://zenpatient.com/blog/dr-rhonda-p ... lzheimers/
Hi Mitrofan,

One of the benefits of learning about ApoE4 is that we are guaranteed to learn new words, which is always good for the brain! The concept of "antagonsitic pleiotropy" is getting a lot of attention across many diseases and conditions as more research shows how frequently a gene has multiple roles, some of which would have been helpful in keeping people alive long enough to have children (and sometimes long enough to help raise grandchildren) which in turn keeps the gene "alive" for generation after generation. In return, though, that same gene might cause late-life changes that eventually contribute to disease.

Those late-life effects in ApoE 4 would not necessarily be the opposite of showing that in early life, ApoE 4 shows no particular benefit or harm to how smart someone is. (That is REALLY hard to determine after the fact, by the way, since as Trevor and Roxanne have shown, your home environment and the skills of teachers can have a huge impact on how well you do in school. School grades and even level of education completed often have more to do with socio-economic advantages and access to education than to genetic gifts.)

The good news for you is that your father and grandfather may also have been affected by prior levels of air and water pollution, poor understanding of the importance of blood pressure and heart health, diabetes, processed foods, smoking and job-related stress and dangers. You have the real chance to change the story for your family! Don't worry about learning everything about Alzheimer's; instead spend some of every day doing something that your future self will thank you for (exercise, time spent learning, time spent with family and friends, etc.)

Be well.
4/4 and still an optimist!
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Re: apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

Post by roxanne »

slacker wrote:
roxanne wrote:I might get dementia one day but when I was young I wasn't less intelligent than APOe3 kids.
thanks for sharing; you are amazing!
Thank you Slacker. It's so nice to be called amazing lol.
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Re: apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

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After perhaps tens of thousands of years of speculation the genetic architecture of humans has begun to be revealed over the last few years. In stark contrast to almost all of the expert opinion, no genetic variants have been found that substantially increase human intelligence. If there had been, then we would already be confronted with the highly disruptive possibility of genetically engineering (through CRISPR) of 100 or more points of IQ into the next generation. It is quite remarkable: No one had been able to project this future.

Instead what we have are perhaps upwards of tens of thousands of variants of very small effect size. With current GWAS sample sizes of over 1 million, one presumes that if epsilon 4 had even a tiny effect on cognitive ability, then this would have already been reported: It hasn't.

There are a range of profound social consequences that arise from how human intelligence is encoded in our genes. Given that the effect sizes are so small, regression to the mean is essentially unavoidable. Very smart parents have not as smart children; very unsmart parents have smarter children; the social class system is much more psychometrically hollow than could have been imagined even a few years ago; the potential for profound increases in human cognitive ability (upwards of 1000+ IQ humans) follows by logical necessity... . In brief, foundational assumptions that have been made about human ability have been overturned. A future of social unity instead of division seems inevitable. In the short term, it would not be entirely unexpected that in the name of social and economic efficiency, existing genetic technology will be deployed such that cognitive ability where ever it might reside in the community will be identified early and developed for the good of all.

The difficult topic of group differences in intelligence can also finally be addressed. Simply using current genetic technology much of the disparities between groups could be overcome. Every potential couple has the genetic potential through mere selection to produce embryos of substantially increased intelligence.

Quite obviously a polygenetic revolution has begun!

Societies that understand and implement population scale genetic engineering projects will derive extreme benefits. These nations will be populated with citizens with high intelligence, largely free of illness, and with the ability to create extreme levels of wealth. The overwhelming collective benefit of widespread IQ uplift will triumph over those societies that merely think in terms of individual self-interests. Given the extreme fertility collapse that is currently underway, those communities who think in terms of the me and not the we likely will have no viability much beyond the 21st Century.
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Re: apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

Post by Bomag »

I'm a 4/4 and my childhood IQ was measured in the 140s. Never had any trouble learning stuff. I have lots of other problems I associate with APOE 4/4, but not intelligence.
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Re: apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

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Bomag wrote:I'm a 4/4 and my childhood IQ was measured in the 140s. Never had any trouble learning stuff. I have lots of other problems I associate with APOE 4/4, but not intelligence.
HI again, Bomag,
Your IQ would put you in the top 1% of people, a "1 percenter" status you can be happy to have, since it gives you a hefty brain account of "cognitive reserve" and likely "brain resilience" to draw upon for decades.

As a participant in the Generations 1 Stage 3 clinical drug trial for healthy individuals with ApoE 4/4, I have had cognitive test batteries for 3 years. Because the trial was halted, I was able to find out how I did on those tests and will find out if I was on the drug or placebo in a few months. I have not changed at all on multiple cognitive measures during the last three years and think that's great news at almost age 68. It suggests that many small, early studies of ApoE 4, based on people diagnosed with dementia, vastly under-estimated the likelihood of continuing to have a healthy brain into our 70's and beyond.

You may be surprised to know that researchers are looking for people like us with health brains and curious minds. They also realize that people want to be active participants and gain as much information as possible while participating in a trial.
If you're interested in finding out more about study opportunities, here's some info:

The All of Us Research Program is sponsored by the National Institute of Health: All of Us is
inviting one million people across the U.S. to help build one of the most diverse health databases in history. We welcome participants from all backgrounds. Researchers will use the data to learn how our biology, lifestyle, and environment affect health. This could help them develop better treatments and ways to prevent different diseases.
The Alzheimer's Association spends millions each year to support research on prevention and treatment of AD, and has a Trial Match of studies that include non-drug trials. You can read more here:
Trial Match

The Alzheimer's Clinical Trial Consortium (ACTC) is a network of dozens of academic research centers collaborating to accelerate research, with funding from the National Institute on Aging (NIA/NIH). They have an online Alzheimer's Prevention Trial web study called for people who are 50 years or older. You can find information about it here: APT Webstudy Welcome (Full disclosure: I am on the Research Participant Advisory Board for the ACTC, although I am not in any ACTC-sponsored clinical trial.)

Enjoy re-writing the story line for ApoE 4 and IQ's!
4/4 and still an optimist!
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Re: apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

Post by Bomag »

Thank you for that information. As a scientist, I'm interested in ongoing research and might be interested in participating (I'm 70). I'll check out the links.
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Re: apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

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Bomag, might you be interested in trying some neuropsych tests?
If so, download PEBL 2.1 from url below; run the app by typing PEBL into your Windows search bar and select; click run without a password and OK; click battery\ towards the top left then click hicks\ , select hick.pbl, then Run selected test near the top left of the app window. You can navigate up through the directories by clicking ..\; might also like to try letterdigit. The data for the runs is in data\ within each of the tests. You could post your data if you want and we could discuss the background theory.

http://pebl.sourceforge.net/
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Re: apoe4 children have lower IQ`s ?

Post by TheresaB »

TheresaB wrote:This was just published, 07 February 2020 Genetic Burden for Late-Life Neurodegenerative Disease and Its Association With Early-Life Lipids, Brain, Behavior, and Cognition. The researchers collected blood samples, MRIs, and conducted non-verbal IQ and educational attainment assessments in children from age 6 to 11 with a sample size per analysis that varied between 1,641 and 3,650 children.
Results: We did not find evidence that APOE genotype or the polygenic scores impact on childhood nonverbal intelligence, educational attainment, internalizing behavior, and global brain structural measures including total brain volume and whole brain fractional anisotropy (all p > 0.05).
Conclusion: We found no evidence that genetic burden for late-life neurodegenerative diseases associates with early-life cognition, internalizing behavior, or global brain structure.
Now to add to that above study which erodes at the assertion that ApoE4 children have lower IQs, there's this paper, published June 11, 2020, Short-term memory advantage for brief durations in human APOE ε4 carriers https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66114-6. The paper says:
Importantly, individuals carrying the APOE ε4 gene actually exhibited a significant memory advantage across all ages, specifically for brief retention periods but crucially not for longer durations. Together, these findings present the strongest evidence to date for a gene having an antagonistic pleiotropy effect on human cognitive function across a wide age range, and hence provide an explanation for the survival of the APOE ε4 allele in the gene pool.
-Theresa
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