CLBs detected by alpha-synuclein antibodies in patients with PD are a more sensitive and specific correlate of dementia than the presence of Alzheimer's pathology, which was present in a minority of the cases in this series.

Are humans currently evolving? This question can be answered using data on lifetime reproductive success, multiple traits and genetic variation and covariation in those traits. Such data are available in existing long-term, multigeneration studies - both clinical and epidemiological - but they have not yet been widely used to address contemporary human evolution. Here we review methods to predict evolutionary change and attempts to measure selection and inheritance in humans. We also assemble examples of long-term studies in which additional measurements of evolution could be made. The evidence strongly suggests that we are evolving and that our nature is dynamic, not static.

No abstract

Our aims were to demonstrate that natural selection is operating on contemporary humans, predict future evolutionary change for specific traits with medical significance, and show that for some traits we can make short-term predictions about our future evolution. To do so, we measured the strength of selection, estimated genetic variation and covariation, and predicted the response to selection for women in the Framingham Heart Study, a project of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and Boston University that began in 1948. We found that natural selection is acting to cause slow, gradual evolutionary change. The descendants of these women are predicted to be on average slightly shorter and stouter, to have lower total cholesterol levels and systolic blood pressure, to have their first child earlier, and to reach menopause later than they would in the absence of evolution. Selection is tending to lengthen the reproductive period at both ends. To better understand and predict such changes, the design of planned large, long-term, multicohort studies should include input from evolutionary biologists.evolutionary rates | heritability | Homo sapiens | medical traits A re contemporary humans experiencing natural selection and evolving in response to it? The answer to that question depends on whom one asks. A long tradition in the medical community (1) holds that natural selection does not operate on contemporary human populations because medicine keeps "alive many who otherwise would have perished" (2). No evolutionary biologist would now agree with that claim, for natural selection works through differential reproductive success rather than simple differential survival, and individuals in contemporary human populations vary in lifetime reproductive success (LRS). Selection operates on any trait that varies and is correlated with LRS, and traits respond to selection with change across generations if they vary genetically. But what traits is selection operating on? Do they include the traits treated by physicians? Previous work (e.g., ref.3) has shown that human life history traits, most significantly age at first reproduction, are currently under selection, but evidence for selection operating on traits of medical importance is scarce. Here, we report estimates of natural selection, and the potential genetic response to selection, in the women of the first two generations of the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) population. The traits we analyzed include traits of medical significance: total cholesterol (TC), systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and blood glucose (GLU). We had three general aims: first, to correct the still widespread misconception that natural selection is not operating on contemporary humans; second, to make quantitative predictions about future evolutionary change for specific traits with medical significance; and third, to register firmly a point of general cultural interest that follows directly from our first two aims: We are still evolving, and for some traits we c...