Researchers have identified a gene that appears to increase a person’s risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of Alzheimer’s disease.

“Only recently have common variants in genes other than APOE been convincingly shown to be associated with a person’s risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease,” said senior author Margaret Pericak-Vance, PhD, Director of theUniversity of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics in Miami, Florida.

The study found that individuals with a particular variation in the gene MTHFD1L may be almost twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease as those people without the variation.

http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20100414/new-alzheimers-gene-identified