A further 42 genes connected to the development of the disease have been uncovered in a massive study.
A massive new Alzheimer’s study has revealed a further 42 genes connected to the development of the disease, which may lead to new ways of stopping it in its tracks The Guardian reports.
The study, which was published on Monday in the journal Nature Genetics, says: “The new risk variants identified in the present study are significantly associated with progression” to Alzheimer’s.
What the study looked at
The investigation, which is the largest of its kind to date, compared the genomes of 100,000 people with Alzheimer’s and 600,000 healthy people. It identified a total of 75 genes associated with a heightened risk of the disease, including 42 that hadn’t been linked to it before.
The study also proposed that degeneration in dementia patients’ brains may be accelerated by “over-aggressive” activity in the brain’s microglia — aka, its immune cells.
Why does this matter?
“This is a landmark study in the field of Alzheimer’s research and is the culmination of 30 years’ work,” co-author Julie Williams, center director at the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University, said in a statement.
“Lifestyle factors such as smoking, exercise and diet influence our development of Alzheimer’s, and acting to address these now is a positive way of reducing risk ourselves,” she added. “However, 60-80% of disease risk is based on our genetics and therefore we must continue to seek out the biological causes and develop much-needed treatments for the millions of people affected worldwide.”
“This is an enormous clue to what’s going wrong. Eight or nine years ago we weren’t working on the immune system. The genetics has refocused us.”
How will this help scientists in the future?
This revelation offers scientists the possibility of new targets for treatments, medications and lifestyle changes that could reduce the likelihood of developing the deadly disease.
“The future of Alzheimer’s disease is precision medicine and prevention,” Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic in the Center for Brain Health at Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine, told CNN. “This paper gives us so many more tools in our toolbox to, eventually, more precisely target Alzheimer’s disease.”
As The Guardian notes, the study has also given scientists the chance to develop a genetic risk score that could predict the patients with cognitive impairment who will go on to develop Alzheimer’s within three years of their initial symptoms. While the score isn’t meant for clinical use right now, it may offer a useful guide when recruiting people for clinical trials of treatments targeting the early stages of the disease.
