“Distant” clinical implications
Commenting on the study, Howard Fillit, MD, founding executive director and chief science officer of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, said that there is currently “a fair amount of this kind of work going on” in assessing polygenetic risk in Alzheimer’s disease. This includes examining APOE as well as “a whole bunch of other genes” associated with the disease.
“Far and away, the APOE genetic association with Alzheimer’s disease risk is the most powerful one. In and of themselves, none of these other risk genes cause Alzheimer’s disease, they only contribute to risk,” Dr. Fillit noted.
“This study found some new genes that were associated with susceptibility to tau deposition, but at the end of the day, they are just associations. They don’t prove causality,” he added.
“It’s interesting, but really hard to know what to conclude from it; and the clinical implications, I think, are rather distant,” Dr. Fillit concluded.
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health; the Gerald and Henrietta Rauenhorst Foundation; the Alexander Family Alzheimer’s Disease Research Professorship of Mayo Clinic; the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research; a Liston Award; the Elsie and Marvin Dekelboum Family Foundation; the Schuler Foundation; and Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, which supplied the imaging agent used by researchers to detect tau in the brain. Ramanan and Fillit have reported no relevant financial relationships.
This article first appeared on Medscape.com.