Identification of metabolic biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease
2018
National Institutes of Health (NIH), Baltimore, USA
Alzheimer disease is a multifactorial neurodegenerative disease that leads to cognitive decline and death. Despite the accumulating knowledge, the relationships between metabolic perturbations and Alzheimer's pathogenesis are poorly understood. Thus, new insights into the global perturbations in metabolism caused by or that lead to Alzheimer's disease are critical to develop better therapeutic strategies. Here, a parallel metabolic analysis of brain and blood samples from different cohort studies were performed to identify alterations that correlate the development of the pathology to the prodromal and preclinical measures of Alzheimer's progression. With machine learning, it was possible to elucidate 26 metabolites in brain samples that effectively discriminated between healthy and diseased patients. The same metabolites were analysed in blood samples to correlate them with various tests performed during the cohort studies and were found to be consistently associated with Alzheimer's severity at autopsy and Alzheimer's progression. The biological pathways to which the metabolites were related included several already known pathways relevant to Alzheimer's disease. In this study, the researchers identify a group of metabolites from blood and brain samples as potential biomarkers of Alzheimer's severity and progression that could also open the door to new therapeutical targets to tackle metabolism perturbations in the disease.
Brain and blood metabolite signatures of pathology and progression in Alzheimer disease: A targeted metabolomics study
Madhav Thambisetty
Added on: 10-01-2021
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002482[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/a8fd26ef-b113-47ab-92ba-fd2be449c7eb
