Alzheimer's Disease, Down's Syndrome, and Aging: The Genetic Approach

HEN I first heard that adults with Down's syndrome aged prew maturely and died with the stigmata of Alzheimer's disease, I was excited because i t seemed to me that if Down's syndrome was due to a trisomy of chromosome 21, then Alzheimer's disease in karyotypically normal subjects must be due to some sort of disorder in gene expression on that chromosome. In this paper we will present evidence that Alzheimer's disease is an inherited disease, whose penetrance in a particular family is a function of aging.