David PerlmutterPresident,, Perlmutter Health Center · Board-Certified Neurologist | Functional Medicine Pioneer | #1 New York Times Best-Selling Author | International Speaker | Host of The Empowering Neurologist Podcast

Is Alzheimer’s written in your genes?

17 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief segment, the speaker explains that neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s are rarely caused by a single gene. While a few rare cases stem from a single pathogenic mutation, the overwhelming majority of Alzheimer’s cases arise from a complex polygenic architecture involving potentially hundreds or thousands of small genetic risk variants. These genetic predispositions interact with environmental exposures and lifestyle factors accumulated over a person’s life, shaping disease risk.

Chapters

The causes of these neurodegenerative diseases, it's rarely ever one gene that's the smoking gun for these. That happens in the minority of cases. Occasionally, people will get a disease from just one mutation and one gene, but the vast majority of people that get, say, Alzheimer's disease are caused by a combination of many, many hundreds, potentially, or thousands of little genetic risk factors. That probably interact with the environments they're exposed to and the lifestyle they lead and what they accumulate over their life course.