In a new study, researchers open up new hope for diagnosing and treating Alzheimer’s disease.
The research was led by a team at Monash University and elsewhere.
has opened up new hope for diagnosing and treating Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia in older people and, as there are no effective treatments, is one of the leading contributors to the global disease burden.
Various genes have been implicated in the changes that happen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.
What is not known is how the activity of the genes—called gene expression—affects the many different cells of the brain.
In the study, the team focused on how individual cell types in the brain contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.
Through a series of complex tests, they looked at patterns in gene expression in specific cells and how changes in specific cell subpopulations are associated with Alzheimer’s.
They were excited to make a number of key discoveries into understanding Alzheimer’s disease that requires further study.
This included the role of disease gene networks, genes working together, in the human brain, pathways to genetic susceptibility, subcellular changes in areas of the brain, and the role of myelination in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis.
The team says although this study contributes to the understanding of the transcriptional changes underpinning changes in brain cells in Alzheimer’s disease, examining larger patient cohorts in the future will enable assessment of the effects and relative contribution of underlying genetic factors to the described cellular and transcriptomic changes in disease.
They anticipate that their findings will stimulate and allow further discoveries in many different areas, as exemplified by our work.
The team will now conduct further research on genes that can potentially be treated with medical drugs.
The lead author of the study is Professor Jose Polo, from the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute.
The study is published in Nature Neuroscience.
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