A Mathematical Model of Alzheimer's Disease and the Apoe Gene

Alzheimer's disease (AD) accounts for a significant proportion of long-term care costs. The recent discovery that the ε4 allele of the ApoE gene indicates a predisposition to earlier onset of AD raises questions about the potential for adverse selection in long-term care insurance, about long-term care costs in general, and about the potential effects on costs of gene therapy, or better targetted treatments for AD. This paper describes a simple Markov model for AD, and the estimation of the transition intensities from the medical and epidemiological literature.