So there’s this article on NPR (https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293253/his-genes-forecast-alzheimers-his-brain-had-other-plans?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us but I’ll summarize it for you.
- Early-onset Alzheimers runs in his family; no one else has lived to be past 60 and they all had it by 50. The cause is a mutation in a specific gene.
- He is the only person to have lived to 75 with that mutation. (Two other people in Colombia have lived past 60, but their mutation is on a different chromosome.)
- They don’t know why. Certain mutated proteins accumulate throughout the brain in normal sufferers, but they’re concentrated in a tiny area in him.
- They suspect the fact that he has a lot of heat shock proteins in his brain might be causing it; heat shock proteins are caused by working in hot environments, like the engine room of a ship. (He was in the Navy for 20 years, and temperatures are routinely above 43 Celsius or 110 Fahrenheit.)
Wildly irresponsible world-building follows.
You have a hot planet—call it “Hades”—with a high frequency of this particular mutation. It doesn’t particularly express itself because of heat shock proteins...but when people leave the planet young, before 25, they don’t have sufficient levels of heat shock proteins.
(Insert reason for high frequency: possibly founder's effect, possibly that there’s no selective pressure against it.)
Now insert general prejudice about people from Hades, because “everybody knows” that they develop early onset Alzheimers if they are off the planet.
A story? No. But a detail you could throw into a story.
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