Researchers are figuring out how African ancestry can affect certain brain disorders

Black Americans have been underrepresented in most genomic studies of neurological disorders. As a result of this disparity, there's a lot scientists don't know about whether African ancestry affects a person's risk for these disorders or their response to a particular treatment.

To help close this gap, African American community leaders in Baltimore, the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Duke University and Morgan State University created the African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative in 2019.

Now, the first study to come out of the initiative finds that genes associated with African ancestry seem to affect some brain cells in ways that could increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease and stroke. But genes associated with European ancestry seem to influence other brain cells that may increase the risk of Parkinson's disease, which is less common in Black Americans.

The results were published in Nature Neuroscience in May.

Dr. Kafui Dzirasa, an investigator and professor of psychiatry at Duke University, advised the study and says that the ultimate hope is that research like this leads to medical care that takes into account things like people's genes.

"The more optimal future is one in which we understand each person's individual genomic architecture and then prescribe medicines based on this," Dzirasa says. "So I think the future of medicine actually looks a lot like all of us."

This story was originally reported for NPR by science correspondent Jon Hamilton. Read Jon's full story here.

Curious about brain science? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.

Today's episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Jon Hamilton checked the facts, and Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer.