TDP-43 and Alzheimer's

There are quite a few headlines today about a link between Alzheimer's and a protein called TDP-43. This is interesting stuff, but like everything else in the neurodegeneration field, it's going to be tough to unravel what's going on. This latest work, just presented at a conference in Copenhagen, found (in a large post mortem brain study of people with diagnosed Alzheimer's pathology) that aberrant forms of the protein seem to be strongly correlated with shrinkage of the hippocampus and accompanying memory loss. 80% of the cohort with normal TDP-43 (but still showing Alzheimer's histology) had cognitive impairment at death, but 98% of the ones with TDP-43 mutations had such signs. That says several things: (A) it's possible to have classic Alzheimer's without mutated TDP-43, (B) it's possible to have classic Alzheimer's tissue pathology (up to a point, no doubt) without apparent cognitive impairment, and (C) it's apparently possible (although very unlikely) to have mutated TDP-43, show Alzheimer's pathology as well, and still not be diagnosed as cognitively impaired. Welcome to neurodegeneration. Correlations and trends are mostly what you get in that field, and you have to make of them what you can. TDP-43, though, has already been implicated, for some years now, in ALS and several other syndromes, so it really does make sense that it would be involved. It may be that it's disproportionately a feature of more severe Alzheimer's cases, piling on to some other pathology. It...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Alzheimer ' s Disease Source Type: blogs