Increased risk of dementia in mothers of Alzheimer's disease cases

Abstract

This study tests the hypothesis of maternal inheritance of AD in families of 118 subjects with this disorder enrolled in The Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD).The parental generation included 24 subjects with dementia. Using the Cox proportional hazards model, we found the age-adjusted mother-to-father relative risk to be 2.8 (95% CI, 1.1 to 7.7). Among a subset of 10 families with one affected parent and at least two affected siblings, the ratio of affected mothers-to-fathers was 9:1. These findings support recent studies that found a high mother-to-father ratio among affected parents of subjects with AD. Together, these results suggest maternal inheritance of AD and are consistent with several hypotheses regarding the genetic nature of AD.NEUROLOGY 1996;47: 254-256