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Several current and previous members of the EVENTS Lab including Sam Berens, Jess Daly, and Chris Bird were co-authors, together with Jenny Rusted and led by Dr Claire Lancaster on this recently published new paper in the Alzheimer’s & Dementia (the Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association), titled 'Perceptual discrimination of complex objects: Apolipoprotein E e4 gene-dose effects in mid-life'.

The study reveals a subtle effect whereby healthy mid-age adults who carry more copies of the APOE e4 allele were poorer at a difficult "odd-one-out" perceptual task. Carriers of the e4 allele are at increased risk of having biological markers of Alzheimer's disease (AD), such as aggregation of tau in the medial temporal lobes. Performance on the perceptual task depends on these same medial temporal lobe regions, so it may serve as an early marker of AD risk. Jess Daly was also part of the Alzheimer's Society Doctoral Training Centre at Sussex.