There also might be specific genetic differences that lead to increased risk of Lewy bodies and other dementia-related brain changes, Snyder suggested.
“This certainly warrants further investigation, to ask those types of questions,” Snyder said.
Researchers were careful to match the patients, making sure that all suffered from similar levels of Alzheimer’s disability prior to death, Barnes said. After death, autopsies revealed that nearly all of the participants had experienced some brain changes related to either Alzheimer’s or dementia.
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Learning the differences between black and white Alzheimer’s patients will be critically important to researchers who hope to find treatments and cures for dementia, said Dr. Ezriel Kornel, assistant clinical professor of neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.
“It will help to more readily treat individuals who have dementia, by understanding what the cause is,” Kornel said. “As we come closer to finding answers to what the causes and cures of Alzheimer’s are, those answers might be effective for [whites] but not effective for the black population. You have to look at more than just Alzheimer’s for a significant segment of the population.”
The autopsies in this study focused on patients with severe late-stage dementia, noted Dr. Reisa Sperling, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Follow-up research hopefully will determine how early in life these brain changes begin, and whether there are ways to reduce people’s risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia, Sperling said.
“We don’t know during life, especially before people have dementia, what is increasing their risk,” said Sperling, also a spokeswoman for the American Federation for Aging Research. “This suggests there may be mechanisms that increase risk in African Americans through multiple different pathways.”
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