Importance: Depressive symptoms are associated with cognitive decline in older individuals. Uncertainty about underlying mechanisms hampers diagnostic and therapeutic efforts. This large-scale study aimed to elucidate the association between depressive symptoms and amyloid pathology. Objective: To examine the association between depressive symptoms and amyloid pathology and its dependency on age, sex, education...
Genetic discoveries of Alzheimer's disease are the drivers of our understanding, and together with polygenetic risk stratification can contribute towards planning of feasible and efficient preventive and curative clinical trials. We first perform a large genetic association study by merging all available case-control datasets and by-proxy study results (discovery n = 409,435 and validation size n = 58,190). Her...
Positron emission tomography (PET) neuroimaging with the Pittsburgh Compound_B (PiB) is widely used to assess amyloid plaque burden. Standard quantification approaches normalize PiB-PET by mean cerebellar gray matter uptake. Previous studies suggested similar pons and white-matter uptake in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy controls (HC), but lack exhaustive comparison of normalization across the three regio...
We investigated the genetic role of sortilin (SORT1) in frontotemporal dementia (FTD). SORT1 is the neuronal receptor for granulin, encoded by the progranulin gene (GRN), a major causal gene for inherited FTD. In Belgian cohorts of 636 FTD patients and 1066 unaffected control individuals, we identified 5 patient-only nonsynonymous rare variants in SORT1. Rare variant burden analysis showed a significant increas...
We investigated the mutation spectrum of the TANK-Binding Kinase 1 (TBK1) gene and its associated phenotypic spectrum by exonic resequencing of TBK1 in a cohort of 2,538 patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or FTD plus ALS, ascertained within the European Early-Onset Dementia Consortium. We assessed pathogenicity of predicted protein-truncating mutations by measuring...
We investigated whether dementia risk factors were associated with prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD) according to the International Working Group-2 and National Institute of Aging-Alzheimer's Association criteria, and with cognitive decline. A total of 1394 subjects with mild cognitive impairment from 14 different studies were classified according to these research criteria, based on cognitive performance and ...
The sortilin-related receptor 1 (SORL1) gene has been associated with increased risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Rare genetic variants in the SORL1 gene have also been implicated in autosomal dominant early-onset AD (EOAD). Here we report a large-scale investigation of the contribution of genetic variability in SORL1 to EOAD in a European EOAD cohort. We performed massive parallel amplicon-based re-sequencing...
Biobanks are important resources for biomarker discovery and assay development. Biomarkers for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease (BIOMARKAPD) is a European multicenter study, funded by the EU Joint Programme-Neurodegenerative Disease Research, which aims to improve the clinical use of body fluid markers for the diagnosis and prognosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD). The objective was...
Importance: Cerebral amyloid-β aggregation is an early pathological event in Alzheimer disease (AD), starting decades before dementia onset. Estimates of the prevalence of amyloid pathology in persons without dementia are needed to understand the development of AD and to design prevention studies. Objective: To use individual participant data meta-analysis to estimate the prevalence of amyloid pathology as meas...
Rare variants in the phospholipase D3 gene (PLD3) were associated with increased risk for late-onset Alzheimer disease (LOAD). We identified a missense mutation in PLD3 in whole-genome sequence data of a patient with autopsy confirmed Alzheimer disease (AD) and onset age of 50 years. Subsequently, we sequenced PLD3 in a Belgian early-onset Alzheimer disease (EOAD) patient (N = 261) and control (N = 319) cohort,...