Search

Respiration enhances cerebrospinal fluid flow through mechanical and autonomic pathways. Inhale length and diaphragm motion influence its displacement and net flow, identifying a modifiable, noninvasive mechanism relevant to brain homeostasis.

Here the authors identify TNIP1 as a risk factor for a fatal neurodegenerative disorder and discover specific genetic loci associated with the three main subtypes of this disorder. The findings highlight distinct disease mechanisms, emphasizing the roles of immunity and the notch signaling pathway.

Empirically based models of disease progression in familial frontotemporal dementia reveal the relative ordering of clinical, neuroimaging, and fluid biomarker changes and facilitate novel clinical trial designs

Large genome-wide meta-analysis of clinically diagnosed late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (LOAD) from 94,437 individuals identifies new LOAD risk loci and implicates Aβ formation, tau protein binding, immune response and lipid metabolism.

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias identifies new loci and enables generation of a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

This study supports neurofilament light chain protein (NfL) in both cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood as an early marker of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease but suggests that NfL in CSF may be better suited than blood for monitoring clinical trial outcomes in symptomatic patients.

Whether a relationship exists between cerebrovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease has been a source of controversy. Here, the authors show there is a very weak temporal relationship between the progression of Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers and those of cerebrovascular disease.

Genome-wide analyses identify common variants associated with 11 distinct neuropathology endophenotypes, providing insights into the mechanisms underlying the genetic risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

Systematic studies are needed to discover molecular determinants of blood brain barrier dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease. This study identifies perturbed pericytic SMAD3-astrocytic VEGFA interactions as a potential driver of this dysfunction.

Multiple comorbidities are associated with higher plasma P-tau181 and P-tau217 levels, and affects their normal reference ranges and cutpoints.

Progressive diseases tend to be heterogeneous in their underlying aetiology mechanism, disease manifestation, and disease time course. Here, Young and colleagues devise a computational method to account for both phenotypic heterogeneity and temporal heterogeneity, and demonstrate it using two neurodegenerative disease cohorts.

Ian Blair and colleagues use genome-wide linkage analysis and whole exome sequencing to identify mutations in the CCNF gene in large cohorts of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia patients. In addition to validating the mutations in international cohorts, the authors also show that mutant CCNFgene product affects ubiquitination and protein degradation in cultured cells.

The authors developed a deep learning-based model to estimate the brain age gap based on metabolic and structural imaging data in cognitively normal individuals and in patients with dementia. An older brain age was associated with Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers and was predictive of future cognitive decline.

Proteomic analysis of cerebrospinal fluid from individuals with autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s disease reveals how this complex and chronic disease evolves over many decades.

A rare case of asymptomatic dominantly inherited Alzheimer’s reveals confined tau pathology and unique proteomic features, highlighting potential resilience mechanisms decades beyond expected onset.

Therriault et al. provide a framework for the individual-level interpretation of plasma biomarkers by determining their positive and negative predictive values for amyloid positron emission tomography status in relation to patient age and clinical symptoms.

The Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network neuroimaging repository is a free resource consisting of PET and MRI scans from 533 individuals across 206 families who are deeply phenotyped with genetic, clinical, cognitive and biofluid sampling.

Perivascular and leptomeningeal macrophages, collectively termed here parenchymal border macrophages, are shown to regulate flow dynamics of cerebrospinal fluid, implicating this cell population as new therapeutic targets in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Ali, Syrjanen et al. examine the relationship between plasma biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease pathology and neurodegeneration and their impact on gait performance in older adults. Elevated biomarkers correlate with diminished gait functionality, suggesting motor function decline is indicated alongside cognitive impairment in the aging population.

In a longitudinal cohort of familial Alzheimer’s disease patients, the rate of change of blood biomarker levels identifies disease carriers much earlier than absolute levels and predicts both neurodegeneration and cognitive decline.

APOE is the major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. In a large number of neuropathologically confirmed cases and controls, the impact of different APOE genotypes on Alzheimer’s dementia risk was greater than previously thought and APOE2 homozygotes had an exceptionally low risk.

Gerard Schellenberg and colleagues report a genome-wide association study of late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD), as part of the Alzheimer Disease Genetics Consortium. They identify common variants in MS4A4/MS4A6E, CD2AP, CD33 and EPHA1 associated with LOAD.

Neuroinflammation is observed in Alzheimer’s disease. Here the authors show that 15 proteins related to inflammation found in CSF can potentially be used as a prognostic biomarker.

The incidence of atrial fibrillation (AF) and the risk of cognitive impairment both increase with age, and the two pathologies share important risk factors. In this Review, Madhavan and colleagues explore the association and mechanisms of cognitive decline and AF, and discuss potential therapies to prevent cognitive impairment in these patients.

Evolutionarily conserved gene modules mediate neurodegenerative dementia in a variety of mouse models and in postmortem brain tissue from patients.

Sven van der Lee, Julie Williams, Gerard Schellenberg and colleagues identify rare coding variants in PLCG2, ABI3 and TREM2 associated with Alzheimer's disease. These genes are highly expressed in microglia and provide additional evidence that the microglia-mediated immune response contributes to the development of Alzheimer's disease.

Vivianna Van Deerlin and colleagues report that common variants at 7p21 are associated with a subtype of frontotemporal lobar degeneration marked by TDP-43 inclusions. They further show that the risk alleles are associated with elevated brain expression of TMEM106B, which resides at the peak of association on 7p21.

David Whitcomb, Bernie Devlin and colleagues report the results of a genome-wide association study of pancreatitis. They identify common variants at two loci associated with risk of this disease, including one on the X chromosome that shows strong evidence of interaction with alcohol consumption.

Azevedo et al. conduct a machine learning-based analysis of structural MRI data from multiple cohorts. The authors identify Alzheimer’s disease-like neuroimaging phenotypes associated with poorer cognitive performance in a healthy UK Biobank cohort, potentially highlighting a population at risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

Inglese et al. develop a predictive model that computes multi-regional statistical morpho-functional mesoscopic traits from T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging scans. Their model reliably discriminates people with Alzheimer’s disease-related pathologies from those without.

Gerard Schellenberg and colleagues report a genome-wide association study for progressive supranuclear palsy, a movement disorder with prominent tau neuropathology. They identified three new risk loci and confirmed the known risk locus at MAPT.