Neuropathological and transcriptomic characteristics of the aged brain.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 29120328.
- Also identified by DOI 10.7554/eLife.31126 and PMC identifier 5679757.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
As more people live longer, age-related neurodegenerative diseases are an increasingly important societal health issue. Treatments targeting specific pathologies such as amyloid beta in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have not led to effective treatments, and there is increasing evidence of a disconnect between traditional pathology and cognitive abilities with advancing age, indicative of individual variation in resilience to pathology. Here, we generated a comprehensive neuropathological, molecular, and transcriptomic characterization of hippocampus and two regions cortex in 107 aged donors (median = 90) from the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study as a freely-available resource (http://aging.brain-map.org/). We confirm established associations between AD pathology and dementia, albeit with increased, presumably aging-related variability, and identify sets of co-expressed genes correlated with pathological tau and inflammation markers. Finally, we demonstrate a relationship between dementia and RNA quality, and find common gene signatures, highlighting the importance of properly controlling for RNA quality when studying dementia.
Medical subject headings
- Aging
- Cerebral Cortex
- Gene Expression Profiling
- Hippocampus