Investigators Seek Ways to Detect and Delay Early Alzheimer’s

Drugs administered before symptoms appear could be key to combating the leading cause of dementia

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In his magical-realist masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez takes the reader to the mythical jungle village of Macondo, where, in one oft-recounted scene, residents suffer from a disease that causes them to lose all memory. The malady erases “the name and notion of things and finally the identity of people.” The symptoms persist until a traveling gypsy turns up with a drink “of a gentle color” that returns them to health. In a 21st-century parallel to the townspeople of Macondo, a few hundred residents from Medellín, Colombia, and nearby coffee-growing areas have begun to assist in the search for something akin to a real-life version of the gypsy's concoction. Medellín and its environs are home to the world's largest contingent of individuals with a hereditary form of Alzheimer's disease. Members of 26 extended families, with more than 5,000 members, develop early-onset familial Alzheimer's, usually before the age of 50, if they harbor an aberrant version of a particular gene.

Familial Alzheimer's, passed down as a dominant genetic trait from only one parent, accounts for less than 1 percent of the more than 35 million cases of Alzheimer's and related dementias worldwide, but its hallmark brain lesions appear to be identical to those in the more common late-onset form of the disease, in which symptoms do not appear until after the age of 65.

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