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Prevalence of Dementia and Apolipoprotein E Genotype Distribution in the Elderly of Buttapietra, Verona Province, Italy

2002; Karger Publishers; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1159/000048620

1423-0208

Maria Donata Benedetti, Alessandro Salviati, S. Filipponi, Maria Grazia Manfredi, Lucrezia Togni, Macarena Gomez‐Lira, Gianola Stenta, E. Fincati, M. Pampanin, N. Rizzuto, G. Danti,

Alzheimer's disease research and treatments

We investigated the prevalence of dementia and the apolipoprotein E (APOE) genotype distribution in the elderly of Buttapietra, a village near Verona, Italy. All residents over the age of 74 (n = 238), including those who were institutionalized, were studied using a direct-contact, single-phase design. The overall prevalence of dementia, clinically defined by DSM-III-R criteria, was 15.8 cases per 100 population, with age-specific figures increasing steeply with advancing age in both sexes. Alzheimer's disease (AD) was the most frequent dementing disorder (43%). APOE genotyping was determined after DNA amplification by restriction isotyping. We found that the epsilon4 allele and the epsilon3/epsilon4 genotype were associated with all types of dementia, although only the association of epsilon3/epsilon4 with AD reached statistical significance (odds ratio 4.5, 95% confidence interval 1.3-16.1). However, as reported in other Mediterranean countries, the frequency of the epsilon4 allele in our population was low (8.9%), suggesting that the population-attributable risk for AD, at least for elderly individuals (> or =75 years), could be small.