Phlogiston's Introduction -- MCI, APOE Status Unknown

[Phlogiston]

Greetings everyone.

After years of memory problems, I was diagnosed last month with MCI at age 57.

I have been striving to comply with the MEND protocol for a little over 3 months now.

As of today I have no idea what my APOE status is. However, I just starting sending medical records to a local Alzheimers clinic, so genetic testing may be in my near future.

My father was diagnosed with (unspecified) dementia at 88 (no brain scans or neuropsych testing) and is now doing much better on Aricept. My mother died from a flurry of strokes at 72 after years of increasingly irrational and abusive behavior. In hindsight, I suspect that she had vascular or temporal lobe dementia. I have every risk factor for dementia except head injury.

I look forward to learning from you and sharing whatever useful information I come up with in my own journey.

[marthaNH]

Good luck, Phlogiston. Hope you get some good care from the AD clinic (if that winds up being appropriate) and that things improve for you. I'm sure it's very difficult. Best to you and welcome.

[Stavia]

Welcome Phlogiston. Please ask if you have any specific questions.

[SusanJ]

Phlogiston, we're glad you found us. We sincerely hope you get some results by following MEND, and other ideas you find here. Do know our founder, Julie, also had cognitive issues and was able to reverse them. Check out her intro under Our Team.

Poke around and feel free to ask questions along the way.

[Julie G]

Welcome, Phlogiston! I'm sure you're aware that not all MCI progresses. I'm hopeful that the strategies you're employing will help. Susan is right, my cognition HAS improved by simply optimizing my overall health. We're glad to have you here, my friend.

[Wondering]

Welcome, Phlogiston! I also have a scary family history of dementia - and am very happy to have found this site! Have been aiming towards the MEND protocol for the last couple of months, getting closer and closer as time goes on. (Enough sleep is the hardest one for me!)

About genetic testing - it is unlikely that your AD clinic will offer testing for APOE status. Most don't (or won't). If you decide that you want to know, the easiest way is to get tested through 23andMe. It will take a few weeks to get results. If you are outside of the US, your results will include APOE status. If you are in the US, 23andMe is not allowed to list health-related results. Instead, you just take your raw results and import them into one of the websites that will identify the specific genes and their health impacts (this is cheap, easy, and all but instant).

There's so much unknown as of yet about Alzheimer's risk; what does seem clear is that APOE status impacts a person's risk, and seems to impact which interventions are more or less likely to help. (Exercise has an especially big effect on us APOE4 folks!) In my case, it was empowering and somewhat of a relief to know my status. That's not true for everyone, though. It's also totally legitimate to choose to not find out...

Again, welcome!

[Phlogiston]

Wondering, thanks for the lead on how to extract health related info from 23andme. I knew that the FDA had forced them to quit discussing health-related information. I'm glad that there is a workaround to make this info available again.

[Stavia]

Its also easy to search for your variant of the actual gene on the 23andme site. Once you know what SNP it is, its obvious. If you want to do this we can show you how to look at your "raw data"

[Phlogiston]

Stavia, I don't know what an SNP is.

[Stavia]

All good honey.
It stands for "single nucleotide polymorphism". It is the mutation in the genetic code for that specific gene. Each gene has a special number.
The number is preceeded by the letters rs. I dunno what rs stands for