If you’re reading this, you’ve got about an 11% chance of having Alzheimer’s disease at age 65 or older. If you were assigned male at birth, your odds of developing this most common type of dementia by age 45 are one in 10, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. For women, the odds at 45 are even more harrowing: one in five. And that’s without a family history of the disease.
While the Food and Drug Administration has in recent years approved drugs such as Leqembi (lecanemab-irmb) and Kisunla (donanemab-azbt) to treat adults in the mild dementia stage of Alzheimer’s, they only slow disease progression. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are testing a preventive medication in patients as young as 18, in the hope of stopping Alzheimer’s decades before symptoms may appear.
