Getting a Jump on Alzheimer's: Patients' Children Join Studies

Oct. 18, 2010— -- Barbara White of Madison, Wis., says she'll never forget the sight of her mother's struggling with Alzheimer's disease. At times, she saw the disease slowly strip her mother away. But, she said, it also brought her siblings together.

"It's a real opportunity to just experience your parents in a very unconditional, soft way," White said. "Every day is a new day; every hour is a new hour, sometimes."

For years, treatment for Alzheimer's seemed to have little effect on patients' suffering extreme memory loss. Now, like White, many who have family members diagnosed with Alzheimer's are volunteering as subjects to help researchers study the disease. And for many researchers, proactive families mean a better opportunity to study brain changes in middle-aged adults as a potential key to treat and prevent the disease.

"The question is, can we find it decades before someone becomes symptomatic?" said Mark Sager, professor in the department of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison school of medicine and public health.

Children of Alzheimer's disease patients are more likely to develop the disease themselves, according to the Alzheimer's Association. And more studies looking at early development of the disease suggest that it's time to break the label of Alzheimer's as a disease of old age, said Dr. Suzanne Craft, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at University of Washington in Seattle.

"Midlife is a time of great vulnerability and the choices we make will have a huge impact in the way our body ages but also in the way our brain ages," Craft said.

With no treatment for the 5.3 million Americans diagnosed with Alzheimer's and the number of cases rising, it may seem that many adults with a family history of the disease would be reluctant to undergo genetic testing to determine their risk. But not White, who participates in studies in memory of her late mother; to learn more about herself and, possibly, to help future generations.

"I have the gene," said White, who is enrolled in one of Sager's Alzheimer's studies. "The tests [studies] are very interesting and it's a challenge."