Reassessing Diabetes and APOE Genotype as Potential Interacting Risk Factors for Alzheimer's Disease.

Objective

To assess whether diabetes alone or in association with Apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 genotype increases the risk of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) diagnosis.

Methods

A retrospective cohort study of 33,456 participants from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center database.

Results

Participants with one or two APOE ε4 alleles had 2.71 (CI:2.55-2.88) and 9.37 (CI:8.14-10.78) times higher odds of AD diagnosis, respectively, relative to those with zero ε4 alleles. In contrast, diabetic participants showed 1.07 (CI:0.96-1.18) times higher odds of AD relative to nondiabetics. Diabetes did not exacerbate the odds of AD in APOE ε4 carriers. APOE ε4 carriage was correlated with declines in long-term memory and verbal fluency, which were strongly correlated with conversion to AD. However, diabetes was correlated with working memory decline, which had a relatively weak correlation with AD.

Conclusions

Unlike APOE ε4, there was little evidence that diabetes was a risk factor for AD.