“Personal Training”: Can Genes Guide Us?

Dementia: Alzheimer's Disease

Dementia is a devastating disease of the elderly that is rather common nowadays due to the prolongation of the life span. It is characterized by cognitive decline, functional disability and behavioral disorders causing to the loss of one's independency. The prevalence of the disease, in western world, for the ages >60 years old it is >5% and doubles every 5 year >65 years old, ending >25% for the ages over the 90 years old (Qiu, Kivipelto, & von Strauss, 2009).

Epidemiology

The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer's disease (AD) (Fratiglioni et al., 2000; Plassman et al., 2007). Alzheimer's disease is one of the most common morbidities in elderly and its prevalence is expected to quadrupled in 2047 (Brookmeyer, Gray, & Kawas, 1998). The cause of this neurodegenerative syndrome is still unclear. It is certain, however, that both genetic and environmental factors take part in Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis (Jiang, Yu, Tian, & Tan, 2013).

The diagnosis is based upon clinical criteria such as NINCDS-ADRDAs (G. M. McKhann et al., 2011; G. McKhann et al., 1984) and DSM V (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Both of the above criteria do not include currently biologic markers (Mattsson et al., 2009; Mulder et al., 2010) or predisposing genes.