FIGHTING A LOCAL LEGEND

In Yarumal, Colombia, lives a unique population of people, many of whom have fallen ill with what locals call La Bobera – “the foolishness”.  The disease, which confuses people before robbing their memories, was once thought to be caused by a priest who cursed the villagers for stealing from his collection boxes. It is now known to be a form of early onset Alzheimer’s, caused by  a mutation in a gene called PSEN1. The town has the largest population of people with Alzheimer’s in the world – about 5000 people have the gene mutation, half of whom are diagnosed by age 45. This year many of Yarumul’s inhabitants will start receiving an investigational Alzheimer’s drug called Crenezumab. A team, led by Francisco Lopera at the University of Antioquia, Colombia, will be looking to see whether early intervention can delay the onset of the disease. This is hard to do in people without the genetic predisposition because so  far it has been impossible to tell who will get the disease and who won’t. The existence of a blood test for predicting who will get Alzheimer’s (see main story) should make this easier, especially if it is accurate decades in advance. “If an even earlier pre-clinical population could be identified, it could be gamechanging,” says Tracy Young-Pearse at Harvard Medical School.