• Celeste Sassi, Rita Guerreiro, Raphael Gibbs, Jinhui Ding, Michelle K Lupton, Claire Troakes, Safa Al-Sarraj, Michael Niblock, Jean-Marc Gallo, Jihad Adnan, Richard Killick, Kristelle S Brown, Christopher Medway, Jenny Lord, James Turton, Jose Bras, Alzheimer's Research UK Consortium, Kevin Morgan, John F Powell, Andrew Singleton, and John Hardy.
• Department of Molecular Neuroscience, UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK; Laboratory of Neurogenetics, National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA. Electronic address: celeste.sassi.10@ucl.ac.uk.
• Neurobiol. Aging. 2014 Dec 1;35(12):2881.e1-6.

AbstractThe overlapping clinical and neuropathologic features between late-onset apparently sporadic Alzheimer's disease (LOAD), familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD), and other neurodegenerative dementias (frontotemporal dementia, corticobasal degeneration, progressive supranuclear palsy, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) raise the question of whether shared genetic risk factors may explain the similar phenotype among these disparate disorders. To investigate this intriguing hypothesis, we analyzed rare coding variability in 6 Mendelian dementia genes (APP, PSEN1, PSEN2, GRN, MAPT, and PRNP), in 141 LOAD patients and 179 elderly controls, neuropathologically proven, from the UK. In our cohort, 14 LOAD cases (10%) and 11 controls (6%) carry at least 1 rare variant in the genes studied. We report a novel variant in PSEN1 (p.I168T) and a rare variant in PSEN2 (p.A237V), absent in controls and both likely pathogenic. Our findings support previous studies, suggesting that (1) rare coding variability in PSEN1 and PSEN2 may influence the susceptibility for LOAD and (2) GRN, MAPT, and PRNP are not major contributors to LOAD. Thus, genetic screening is pivotal for the clinical differential diagnosis of these neurodegenerative dementias.Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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