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Study: Gene May Set Age at Which Brain Diseases Hit Tue 21 October, 2003 21:36 BST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. researchers said on Tuesday they had found a gene that may help determine whether a patient gets Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease late or early in life. Finding out more about the gene may help doctors devise a way to delay the two diseases, which may take decades to fully develop, the researchers said. The gene, called GSTO1 or glutathione S-transferase omega-1, was associated with the late onset of both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the team at Duke University Medical Center, Harvard University and other centers found. Researchers suspect the gene is involved in inflammatory responses in the body. Inflammation may cause the destruction of brain cells behind Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. "This important work gives us a new gene to look at which may affect the timing of late-life forms of these devastating neurodegenerative diseases," Marcelle Morrison-Bogorad of the National Institute on Aging, which helped fund the study, said in a statement. "Further study of this gene and how it works could open up new avenues of research for delaying the onset of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, which share some clinical and pathological characteristics." Duke Alzheimer's expert Dr. Margaret Pericak-Vance and colleagues studied nearly 1,800 Alzheimer's patients and 600 Parkinson's sufferers, as well as several hundred healthy people for comparison. Writing in the journal Human Molecular Genetics, the team, including collaborators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the GlaxoSmithKline Genetics Research Directorate, said delaying Alzheimer's or Parkinson's by even 5 years could mean effectively preventing the diseases in many patients. Pericak-Vance's team also reported this month that they had found two other genetic regions associated with the age at which patients are diagnosed with Alzheimer's -- one, on chromosome 2, strongly linked with early onset Alzheimer's and another, on chromosome 15, with very late onset. Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia among people over 65, affecting 4 million Americans. Parkinson's disease -- characterized by tremors, stiffness of the limbs and trunk and slow movements -- is diagnosed in 50,000 Americans a year. SOURCE: Reuters, UK http://tinyurl.com/rswv * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn