Study links heart disease and Alzheimer's disease in some patients

Washington DC, November 10: Genetics could predispose some people to both Alzheimer's disease and high blood lipid levels such as cholesterol, a common feature of cardiovascular disease.

UC San Francisco researchers and Washington University School of Medicine, badyzed genome-wide data from more than 1.5 million individuals, making it the largest One of the largest studies ever done on Alzheimer's genetics. a biological relationship between the two conditions has remained controversial. Many patients with Alzheimer's disease also show signs of cardiovascular disease and post-mortem studies reveal that the brains of many patients with Alzheimer's disease present with signs of vascular disease, which some scientists have badumed to be able to cause the onset of dementia.

Prevent Alzheimer's disease by treating cardiovascular symptoms, but initial genetic studies and unsuccessful clinical trials of cardiovascular drugs called statins in Alzheimer's disease cast doubt on this possibility.

The new study published in the journal Acta Neuropathologica showed the disease shares common genes in some people, raising new questions about whether this shared biology can be targeted to slow down or prevent both diseases.

"genetically, that is, if you wear this handful of" According to researcher Rahul Desikan, "gene variants may cause not only heart disease but also Alzheimer's disease." [19659003] To identify genetic variants presenting a risk for both cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's disease, they used statistical techniques to enable them to numerous large-scale genome-wide badociation studies (GWAS) – type D & G. Genetic study that establishes statistical links between various disease states and widely shared variations of the genetic code.

The team of researchers ends up badyzing the impact of these genetic markers on the risk of cardiovascular disease – based out of five GWAS studies of more than one million individuals – and on the risk of Alzheimer's – based on three GWAS studies of nearly 30,000 patients with Alzheimer's disease and more than 50,000 controls of the same age.

This badysis allowed researchers to identify 90 points in the genome where specific DNA variants increased the combined chances of patient development. Levels of lipid molecules, including HDL and LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, which are common risk factors for cardiovascular disease, have been confirmed.

The researchers confirmed that six of these 90 regions had a very strong "significant genome". effects on Alzheimer's disease and increased levels of lipids in the blood, including several genes that had never been badociated with the risk of dementia. These included several sites in the CELF1 / MTCH2 / SPI1 region on chromosome 11 that were previously linked to the biology of the immune system.

In contrast, although patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease also often show belly fat, type 2 diabetes and chest pain or other symptoms of coronary heart disease, Authors could find no clear genetics overlapping between Alzheimer's disease and these risk factors.