Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) have developed a new method to identify people with a higher genetic risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease before symptoms appear, which could help speed the creation of new treatments. The findings are published in the journal “PLOS Genetics”
Alzheimer’s patients experience a gradual loss of memory and other cognitive functions. Although some treatments can relieve symptoms, it has been a challenge to develop treatments to prevent or slow the progression of the disease. Some clinical trials investigating potential treatments have been unsuccessful because they involved patients whose disease was too advanced to be treated. have better methods for identify people at high risk of developing Alzheimer’s could help design new treatments.
Manish Paranjpe’s team at MIT analyzed data on 7.1 million common DNA variants – alterations in the standard DNA sequence – from an earlier study that included tens of thousands of people with and without Alzheimer’s.
They used this data to develop a novel method that predicts a person’s Alzheimer’s risk, depending on which DNA variants they have. They then refined and validated the method with data from more than 300,000 additional people.
Although they acknowledge that their DNA-based method is unlikely to be suitable for predicting a patient’s risk of Alzheimer’s, as it may be less accurate for non-European populations, as well as potentially causing anxiety without the relief from reliable preventative treatments. However, it could be applied to speed up Alzheimer’s research.
Could be used to speed up Alzheimer’s research
To demonstrate the potential of the new method, the researchers applied it to determine the Alzheimer’s risk of each of 636 blood donors and examined whether blood levels of any of the 3,000 proteins were higher or lower than normal in those donors. identified as high risk.
The analysis uncovered 28 proteins that could be linked to Alzheimer’s risk, including several that had never been studied in Alzheimer’s research. Studying these proteins could reveal new directions for drug development.
Lead author Amit V. Khera notes that “we have developed a genetic predictor of Alzheimer’s disease associated with both clinical diagnosis and age-dependent cognitive decline. By studying the circulating proteome of healthy individuals with very high versus low inherited risk, our team nominated new biomarkers of neurocognitive disease.”