October 30, 2024

12:00 pm via zoom

Dr. Molly Fox
UCLA

" Alzheimer’s Disease: A Case of Evolutionary Mismatch?” "

There are certain aspects of life in contemporary, post-industrial, urbanized contexts that may promote diseases that would have been at much lower frequency or absent in prior ecological contexts, i.e., the concept of evolutionary mismatch. I argue that natural selection would not have eliminated the underlying susceptibility to Alzheimer’s disease because, for the vast majority of human evolutionary history, we lived in contexts in which the disease did not manifest regardless of genetic risk. The two elements of mismatch on which I focus are women’s reproductive life-history and microbial exposures. These are two of the most profound ways in which human biology has changed over the past 15,000 years. I share my lab’s results from several human cohort studies, demonstrating that female reproductive life-history patterns and microbial exposures contribute to Alzheimer’s risk/resilience in ways that are compatible with an evolutionary mismatch framework.