A new study as part of the VA Million Veteran Program (MVP) has unveiled that people of African descent have distinct dementia risks than those of European descent.
The study is available in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
For the study, researchers compared the genomes of over 4,000 MVP participants of African descent who had a history of dementia with over 18,000 veterans with no dementia.
An association between dementia risk and genetic variants, such as APOE, led to the study’s determination.
“In this study, data from the Million Veteran Program (MVP), a biobank which includes genetic data from more than 650,000 US Veteran participants, was used to examine dementia genetics in an African descent (AFR) cohort,” the researchers wrote in their report.
“This represents the largest AFR GWAS of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementia, finding non-APOE GWAS-significant common SNPs associated with dementia. Increasing representation of AFR participants is an important priority in genetic studies and may lead to increased insight into AD pathophysiology and reduce health disparities.”
