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Joshua Stevenson-Hoare (Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK)
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia, and typically begins after age 65. The reasons why people get AD are complicated and not yet fully understood, but one way we can think about developing AD is through “risk”. Your risk of getting AD is most strongly predicted by your age, but this is not very helpful when thinking about whether you will get AD in the future as there is nothing much to be done about getting older! One thing that does stay the same throughout your life is your genetic code. Depending on what genes and mutations you have in your DNA, you can have a different level of risk of developing AD in later life. For most cases of AD, the most important gene is APOE. There are three kinds of APOE: ε2 which reduces risk, ε3 which is the normal level of risk, and ε4 which increases your risk. Alongside APOE, there are also many small genes and mutations which can also affect your risk, which we can think about using polygenic risk scores. When we also include age, sex, and life expectancy, it all starts to get very confusing. But, if we can understand the risk from each individual part of the machine, we get a better idea of the overall working.