Back

Genome-wide cross-trait analysis of vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease highlights novel loci and lung-brain axis

Liu, G.; Gao, S.; Wu, S.; Liu, F.; Zhu, P.; He, Y.; Hu, S.; Wang, R.; Yang, J.; Zhao, L.; Liu, X.; Han, Z.; Wang, T.; Zhang, Y.; Wang, K.; Chen, Y.; Li, K.

2026-03-02 genetic and genomic medicine
10.64898/2026.02.27.26345967 medRxiv
Show abstract

Until now, most genetic risk for vascular dementia (VD) remains unknown. Here, we firstly performed the largest cross-ancestry genome-wide association study meta-analysis comprising 5,886 VD and 1,027,883 controls of European, East Asian, South Asian, African, and Admixed American ancestry. We identified 37 genome-wide significant loci including CLU and APOE tagged by common variants and 35 loci tagged by rare variants, and demonstrated enrichment of VD heritability in lung and genetic association between VD and lung function traits. We further conducted a cross-trait of VD and Alzheimers disease, and identified 13 genome-wide significant loci including CR1, BIN1, GRM7, HLA-DRA, TREM2, CLU, ECHDC3, AGBL2, MS4A4E, PICALM, SLC24A4, ABCA7, and APOE. A multi-omics integrative analysis identified 619 genes. 241 genes were significantly differentially expressed in VD cells and 21 exhibited strong evidence of interaction with FDA-approved drugs. Collectively, our findings provide valuable insights into the potential underlying mechanisms of VD.

Matching journals

The top 3 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.