Neurobiology of Lipids Noteworthy Articles

Noteworthy section of the Neurobiology of Lipids (ISSN 1683-5506) alerts interested readers about the selected noteworthy original research and viewpoint/review articles, book reviews, and meeting reports (published in other journals) on the subject of the journal scope

NoL Home | Noteworthy home | NoL Content | Archiving your research in NoL is a new service by the Neurobiology of Lipids NoL archives your research | Mission | PubMed | IFORA | Affiliates  | Contact us
For Graduate students: Assistant Editor and Research Assistant Opportunities

September 5, 2007

Heritability of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) traits in Alzheimer disease cases and their siblings in the MIRAGE study

Write to Lunetta KL to ask them to make this article freely available at NoL Archive

Alzheimer Dis Assoc Disord. 2007 Apr-Jun;21(2):85-91
Lunetta KL, Erlich PM, Cuenco KT, Cupples LA, Green RC, Farrer LA, Decarli C; for the MIRAGE Study Group.
Department of Biostatistics, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02118, USA

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) traits can serve as more specific measures of degenerative or cerebrovascular brain injury than can be ascertained through personal history, risk factors, clinical signs, or symptoms. They are potentially useful intermediate phenotypes for genetic studies of Alzheimer disease (AD). Recent studies have estimated heritability of white matter hyperintensity (WMH) among cognitively normal family members to be between 0.55 and 0.73. Persons discordant for AD are expected to have substantially different MRI phenotype distributions; our goal was to determine whether MRI traits in siblings discordant for AD are heritable. We measured cerebral atrophy, medial temporal atrophy (MTA), WMH, and a rating of cerebrovascular disease (CVR) via MRI in 815 participants from 424 families of the Multi-Institutional Research in Alzheimer's Genetic Epidemiology Study. Residual heritability after adjustment for covariates ranged from 0.17 (P=0.009) for MTA to 0.57 (P=10(-7)) for CVR. The number of APOE-epsilon4 alleles was significantly associated with WMH (P=0.01) and CVR (P=0.005) but not cerebral atrophy (P=0.25) or MTA (P=0.83). Heritability remained significant and high after adjusting for APOE genotype, suggesting that a substantial proportion of the additive genetic variation in these MRI traits is explained by other genes. In the Multi-Institutional Research in Alzheimer's Genetic Epidemiology Study of AD-discordant siblings, MRI traits are heritable and are potential endophenotypes for genetic association studies.

PubMed ID and Record

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home