Risk Factors For Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most severe and most common progressive neurodegenerative diseases of aging. The etiologies of AD are presently poorly understood, however, during the last few years, evidence accumulated suggests a polyetiology is the nature. Analytic epidemiologic study may provide causative clues for AD. We evaluated the association of endogenous estrogen and AD by a population based case-control study in present thesis at first. Then inspected other risk/protective factors for AD by a resembling manner. At last, the oxidative stress may be a pathophysiologic mechanism for AD, we wish to learn whether estrogen protects neurons from the cytotoxicity induced by hydrogen peroxide.I. Endogenous estrogen and Alzheimer's disease: A population based case-control study.Objectives: To investigate the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) associated with endogenous estrogen level. Methods: We conducted a population based, m:n matched case-control study on 115 female AD patients, and 1041 female controls matched for age. Univariate and multivariate analysis was conducted using conditional Logistic model. Results: After exclude the latent effect of education level, occupation, marital status, living arrangement, age at natural menopause still had significantly effect on AD in multivariate analysis. Compared with women whose age at natural menopause less than 47 years old, the OR (Odds ratio) for AD was 0.667 for individuals whose age at menopause between 47 to 50 years old, and 0.445(p=0.0211) for individuals whose age at menopause more than 50 years old compared with...