Alzheimer's Disease Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Alzheimer's Disease, including details on diagnosis, memory loss, heredity, treatment, medication.

Evidence that common variation in NEDD9 is associated with susceptibility to late-onset Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Li Y, Grupe A, Rowland C, Holmans P, Segurado R, Abraham R, Jones L, Catanese J, Ross D, Mayo K, Martinez M, Hollingworth P, Goate A, Cairns NJ, Racette BA, Perlmutter JS, O'Donovan MC, Morris JC, Brayne C, Rubinsztein DC, Lovestone S, Thal LJ, Owen MJ, Williams J

Celera, 1401 Harbor Bay Parkway, Alameda, CA 94502, USA.

Late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) are the most common neurodegenerative disorders and in both diseases susceptibility is known to be influenced by genes. We set out to identify novel susceptibility genes for LOAD by performing a large scale, multi-tiered association study testing 4692 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs). We identified a SNP within a putative transcription factor binding site in the NEDD9 gene (neural precursor cell expressed, developmentally down-regulated), that shows good evidence of association with disease risk in four out of five LOAD samples [N = 3521, P = 5.38x10(-6), odds ratio (OR) = 1.38 (1.20-1.59)] and in addition, we observed a similar pattern of association in two PD sample sets [N = 1464, P = 0.0145, OR =1.31 (1.05-1.62)]. In exploring a potential mechanism for the association, we observed that expression of NEDD9 and APOE show a strong inverse correlation in the hippocampus of Alzheimer's cases. These data implicate NEDD9 as a novel susceptibility gene for LOAD and possibly PD.

Published 14 February 2008 in Hum Mol Genet, 17(5): 759-67.
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