How a Navy vet from Washington may hold key to curing ALZHEIMER'S

Alzheimer's disease has followed Doug Whitney around like a 'plague.' Doug Whitney, a 75-year-old Navy veteran from Washington State, has evaded Alzheimer's disease, despite inheriting a gene that almost guarantees the condition. Experts at Washington University in St Louis are working to figure out how Projected yearly incidence of dementia on the basis of current rates and projected incidence of dementia assuming continuation of a decreasing trend Dr Jorge Llibre-Guerra, an assistant professor of neurology at Washington University in St Louis, said: 'If we are able to uncover the mechanism behind this resilience, we could try to replicate it with a targeted therapy designed to delay or prevent the onset of Alzheimer's, leveraging the same protective factors that have kept Mr Whitney from developing this disease to benefit others.' Mr Whitney's family members make up the less than one percent of Alzheimer's patients who inherited a specific gene that almost always results in Alzheimer's. Mr Whitney grew up with more than a dozen aunts and uncles, but 10 didn't make it to their 60th birthdays The above map shows rates of Alzheimer's disease by US county in people over 65 in 2020 Mr Whitney was the subject of a new study in the journal Nature Medicine.