Early Alzheimer’s Gene Spells Tragedy For Patients, Opportunity For Science
Rosemary Navarro was living in Mexico when her brother called from California. Something wasn’t right with their mom, then in her early 40s. She was having trouble paying bills and keeping jobs as a food preparer in convalescent homes.
Navarro, then 22, sold her furniture to pay for a trip back to the U.S. for herself and her two young children. Almost as soon as she arrived, she knew her mother wasn’t the same person. “She was there but sometimes she wasn’t there,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh man this isn’t going to be good.’”
Before long, Navarro was feeding her mom, then changing her diapers. She put a special lock on the door to keep her from straying out. Unable to continue caring for her, Navarro eventually moved her to a nursing home, where she spent eight years.
Near the end, her mom, a quiet woman who had immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager and loved telenovelas, could communicate only by laughing or crying. Navarro was there when she took her last breath in 2009, at age 53. “What I went through with my mom I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” she said.
It has happened again and again in her family — relatives struck by the same terrible disease, most without any clue what it was. An aunt, an uncle, a cousin, a grandfather, a great grandfather. “Too many have died,” Navarro said. All in their early 50s.
Now the family knows the reason for their curse: It’s a rare type of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, caused by what’s come to be known as the “Jalisco” genetic mutation. Doctors today can tell someone they have it but they can’t stop its destructive march.
For Navarro, watching her relatives succumb is like looking into a crystal ball, one she wants to hurl across the room.
She, too, has the mutation.
It’s getting harder to stifle her fear. In April, she turned 40 — the same age her mother was when she started wandering off and forgetting simple things.
“I don’t look forward to birthdays,” she said. “I didn’t want to celebrate 40, much less 41.”
Sparing The Next Generation
Navarro, who lives in La Habra, Calif., belongs to an exclusive but unenviable club whose members are genetically programmed for early memory loss and death.
Of the more than 5 million people across the U.S. who have Alzheimer’s, 5 percent are believed to have the early-onset form, striking people under the age of 65. Fewer still — about 1 percent — have genetic mutations that are known to cause the disease.
Navarro’s gene is known as the Jalisco mutation because it is believed to have surfaced first in that Mexican state. Passed from parent to child over generations, it likely was carried by immigrants across the Mexican border into California and other states. In Mexico and the U.S., roughly 50 families are known to have the mutation.
Cases like Navarro’s are of great interest to Alzheimer’s researchers. Studying this unique population with genetic mutations, they say, could help unlock some of the biggest mysteries of the more common form of the disease: How does it develop? How can it be diagnosed earlier? What can be done to stop it?
Ordinarily, it’s difficult — if not impossible — to predict Alzheimer’s. But with these families, researchers know the mutation carriers will get the disease. They also know approximately when symptoms will appear. So they can get a real-time look at how the disease develops — and can measure when the brain starts changing relative to expected onset. Perhaps most important, they can design drugs to target the disease before patients lose their memory.
“If you know from age 18 or even from birth whether someone is going to develop the disease or not, you have got a big window to intervene,” Navarro’s doctor, John Ringman, a neurology professor at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. “We don’t have a way to repair or bring back lost brain cells.”
Already, researchers of inherited Alzheimer’s have discovered clues that could lead to potential treatment for all patients with the disease. They have determined, for example, that the formation of amyloid plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s appear decades before the first noticeable signs of memory loss, and they recently began testing whether medications can block those plaques from forming in the brain.
Patients with a familial Alzheimer’s mutation “are sort of a model for how the disease progresses, because they are easier to recognize and easier to study,” said Bruce Miller, a longtime Alzheimer’s researcher who directs the memory and aging center at the University of California, San Francisco.
Around the world, hundreds of people whose families are afflicted with a variety of early-onset mutations are subjecting themselves to medical tests — spinal taps, memory quizzes, MRIs and other brain imaging, hoping scientists can develop therapies to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s.
But their participation often comes with the sad realization that resulting treatments may come too late for them. Ringman is studying about 100 patients at USC. Navarro is among about 30 with the Jalisco mutation.
More than 450 people are part of an international network of research being led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Each has a parent with an early-onset gene mutation. If the research doesn’t help them, they tell researchers, maybe it will help the next generation.
“They are all desperately fearful that they themselves have inherited a mutation,” said John C. Morris, director of the school’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “But what they are really fearful about is that if they did, that they will pass it along to their children.”
Children have a 50 percent chance of inheriting the mutation from a parent who carries it.
Navarro is well aware of the statistics. She has joined the network’s research effort, of which Ringman is a part. She did it not just for herself but for her family — including her two children, now young adults.
Last year, she went for a brain scan. She had no overt symptoms, but the results told a different story. Her brain had already started to shrink — a sign that the disease was taking hold.
‘At Least We Know Now’
In November 2015, Dr. Ringman drove to Colton, Calif. — 60 miles east of Los Angeles — to meet with the large and close-knit Kitchen family. Jay Kitchen and his younger brother John had been referred to him after each suffered a series of baffling symptoms.
It had started about four years earlier. Jay, then a 44-year-old sports writer, began having difficulty speaking. He felt off balance, was forgetting things and having difficulty paying bills.
Soon afterward, his younger brother, John, a high school history teacher, started becoming easily confused. He would forget what day it was and how to get to the market.
“It struck me as really odd,” said John’s wife, Michelle Lopez. “Nobody could forget the store that was around the corner from the house you lived in for 12 years.”Lopez said John started taking illegal drugs. At one point, while they were separated, he was arrested for stalking her. His bizarre behavior, completely uncharacteristic of him, nearly broke up their marriage, she said.
Jay Kitchen was the first to seek help. He went to an emergency room, then several specialists. One suspected a stroke. Another suggested mental illness. Test after test came back negative or inconclusive.
“It has been a long haul trying to get a diagnosis,” said the brothers’ aunt, Linda Ramos, who took Jay Kitchen to most of the appointments. Doctors constantly were “scratching their heads trying to figure out what was wrong.”
Late in 2015, a neurologist referred the brothers to Ringman, who ordered a blood test.
On the November morning in Colton, Ringman arrived at Ramos’ home, where the extended family was gathered. He pulled the brothers and a few others aside to deliver his grim news: Both men had the Jalisco mutation. Ramos said the brothers sat in near silence. She doesn’t think Jay understood, and John, already a quiet man, just seemed scared.
Later that morning, a larger group of family members met with Ringman around a long dining room table: the Kitchens’ father, aunts and uncles; Lopez and Jay Kitchen’s ex-wife. Jay Kitchen’s son came with his newborn, who fussed in a stroller.
Projecting pictures and diagrams on the wall, the doctor explained, in his matter-of-fact way, the history and science behind early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and the different types of mutations that can cause it....
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