Back

Exploration of Alzheimer's Disease MRI Biomarkers Using APOE4 Carrier Status in the UK Biobank

Du, J.; Liu, Z.; Hanford, L. C.; Anderson, K. M.; Feng, J.; Ge, T.; Buckner, R. L.

2021-09-14 neurology
10.1101/2021.09.09.21263324 medRxiv
Show abstract

Large-scale datasets enable novel strategies to refine and discover relations among biomarkers of disease. Here 30,863 individuals ages 44-82 from the UK Biobank were analyzed to explore MRI biomarkers associated with Alzheimers disease (AD) genetic risk as contrast to general effects of aging. Individuals homozygotic for the E4 variant of apolipoprotein E (APOE4) overlapped non-carriers in their 50s but demonstrated neurodegenerative effects on the hippocampal system beginning in the seventh decade (reduced hippocampal volume, entorhinal thickness, and hippocampal cingulum integrity). Phenome-wide exploration further nominated the posterior thalamic radiation (PTR) as having a strong effect, as well as multiple diffusion MRI (dMRI) and white matter measures consistent with vascular dysfunction. Effects on the hippocampal system and white matter could be dissociated in the homozygotic APOE4 carriers supporting separation between AD and cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) patterns. These results suggest new ways to combine and interrogate measures of neurodegeneration.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.