“An Ancient Cure for Alzheimer’s?” is the title of Pagan Kennedy’s article in this week’s New York Times Sunday Review about the paper by Ben Trumble, et al., showing that the allele that increases risk of Alzheimer’s disease in most people causes decreased risk in foragers from the Tsimane population in Bolivia who are carriers of intestinal parasites. Her article is available here. 

The original scientific report, cited below, is available here.

Trumble, B. C., Stieglitz, J., Blackwell, A. D., Allayee, H., Beheim, B., Finch, C. E., … & Kaplan, H. (2017). Apolipoprotein E4 is associated with improved cognitive function in Amazonian forager-horticulturalists with a high parasite burden. The FASEB Journal31(4), 1508-1515.

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